


The Old Norwegian Cabin

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [10]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV), Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Cthulhu Mythos Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Body Language, Cock Rings, Crack Treated Seriously, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Flirting, Humor, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Sex Magic, Sex Toys, Sexual Frustration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:55:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25560931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Doctoral student Athelstan rents a cabin in the Norwegian backwoods to study lichens for his sabbatical, and meets some interesting locals, who find him just as interesting.  And then cosmic eldritch horrors.Oh, yes, he’s currently attached to Brichester University.  Thatmightbe important.Note: This is set in a series I originally developed in theTeen Wolffandom.  It is not part of the major plotline and you don't need to have read that series.  No TW characters show up, just TW's take on werewolves.
Relationships: Athelstan/Lagertha (Vikings), Athelstan/Lagertha/Ragnar Lothbrok, Athelstan/Ragnar Lothbrok, Lagertha/Ragnar Lothbrok
Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/594739
Comments: 32
Kudos: 85





	1. Chapter 1

“Wellhead, here. Signal fire, here. Make sure you keep the brush back to there or else you will lose a few seconds in visibility,” Gunnhild says, pointing with her flashlight.

Athelstan nods with what he hopes is confidence. “Understood. I suppose that’s important if the flare guns have failed.”

Gunnhild glances at him and makes it clear that he’s not convincing in the least, but as a consummate professional, she’s just going to move on. She hikes herself easily up onto the low stone wall that surrounds the wellhead and points out sightlines to local landmarks. The cabin’s far enough from the usual tourist trails that Athelstan shouldn’t be disturbed, but it’s still smack in the middle of one of the most popular wilderness areas in Norway, going back for centuries.

“Easy to find sacrifices,” Gunnhild says.

“Well, no, not really,” Athelstan can’t help correcting her. “This was where the skogar-maors used to hide, and they weren’t usually that easy.”

Gunnhild regards him. He doesn’t get the sense that she’s looking down at him, despite the fact that she has a good half a head on him, or that she disbelieves him. He just…feels that perhaps his commentary doesn’t exactly matter to her.

He smiles nervously and withdraws a step, and Gunnhild lopes off the wall and back towards the cabin to complete the tour. Stifling a sigh, Athelstan follows her with a mental reminder to turn down the teaching impulses a few notches. She’s the local guide for a reason, and anyway, he’s supposed to be on sabbatical. He’s going to have to get used to the fact that he has nobody to teach for the next eleven months.

Gunnhild shows him a few last pointers in how to work the old-fashioned wood-burning stove, then takes her leave and Athelstan finally has the cabin to himself. “Eleven months,” he says under his breath, staring out at the nearly-unmarked path back to civilization.

It barely even shows any trace of Gunnhild’s passing, and she’s certainly not insubstantial. Not that Athelstan means any—he stops himself with a sigh, because she’s not even around to hear his stammering apologies. He’s in an achingly gorgeous wilderness and he _still_ can’t master basic social graces.

He really needs to get started on his work, he thinks as he turns back into the cabin. That always relaxes him.

* * *

After he’s unpacked and rearranged his things, Athelstan feels a little better. He’s tested the wifi and confirmed he can still log into the University library portal—never a sure thing, even on good solid fiber—and has successfully warmed up some canned ravioli without setting himself or the cabin on fire. He’s even made some preliminary observations for his research, after noting a particularly fine specimen of lichen growing on a stick he’d been about to feed into the stove.

Athelstan snaps a photo of the lichen and uploads it to his email to send to Gunnhild and then digs around in his bags till he finds his gloves, a plastic specimen case, his university-issued taser, and his favorite pair of silver-plated tweezers. He dons the gloves and, taser and case at the ready, begins to tweeze the lichen off the stick. At first it seems to resist, but he carefully works around the edges till they start to curl. Grinning, he prepares to give it a firm tug.

That’s when a horrendous racket starts up in the woods. Instead of his firm tug, he jerks the lichen instead and understandably offended, it leaps off the stick and makes a break for the—oh, damn, he left one of the windows open. He’d been worried about carbon monoxide poisoning from the stove, even though Gunnhild had assured him the ventilation was sound, and—the lichen’s already rippling over the sill.

Hissing, Athelstan drops the tweezers and fumbles for the taser, but he’s barely got it in hand before the lichen disappears out the window. He can still see it but even he knows better than to aim a taser in a place with insufficient shielding, so he dashes for the front door and throws it open.

By the time he’s on the stoop, the lichen’s dropped off of the outside sill. Athelstan frantically scans the grass around the window, nearly being foolish enough to step off the stoop, but he doesn’t see anyt—wait.

The lichen, sensing the attention, freezes, but Athelstan has it in his sights. He thumbs the taser’s safety case off and aims, and—that racket again. His shoulders jerk before he can help himself.

He misses and the lichen slithers away to freedom. For a second Athelstan seriously considers plunging after it anyway, but…it’s just day one. “Patience is a virtue, haste is a Class II risk factor,” he mutters to himself, staring into the grass anyway.

Then he looks up at the sky, and the flock of birds—the ones responsible for the racket—wheeling above the treetops. Crows, from the sound of it. He makes an annoyed sound, and then reconsiders. Goes back inside.

His photo still hasn’t uploaded; the wifi apparently can’t manage uncompressed files as well as it can the library’s security system. Athelstan sighs, rubs at the side of his face, and then goes to find his phone. He’ll need it anyway if he’s going out, and since his computer is locked up, he can shoot Gunnhild a quick note via the phone to see if crows are significant.

* * *

Thirty minutes after he texts her, Gunnhild calls him back. _“What do you mean, are crows significant?”_ she asks. _“This is Norway.”_

“Well, yes, I know, but there’s a lot of folklore about—” Athelstan starts, half-distracted by the brush trying to eat his foot.

 _“That is what I mean,”_ Gunnhild says, making it very clear she is being very patient. _“This is Norway. Crows have meaning here.”_

“Oh, I see,” Athelstan says. He finally kicks his way free of the brush, only to overbalance himself and nearly fall face-first into a very nasty-looking boulder. “I mean, I see the source of the miscommunication, not that I didn’t already know that. Ah. I mean. Do crows have significance when they’re right overhead?”

Gunnhild is silent for a moment. 

“Sorry if I’m not providing enough context, I’m trying to talk and walk at the same time,” Athelstan says. “I mean, when they’re right over one of the spots. In a double helix pattern.”

 _“Oh,”_ Gunnhild says. _“Yes, that means it might be active.”_

Athelstan doesn’t think she’s being difficult on purpose. She sounds genuinely puzzled about what he’s after, and he is calling her after her official business hours. On the other hand, they both know why he chose this cabin so he’s not sure if it’s really necessary for him to provide all of the context.

“Well, they keep leaving the trees and circling around and making a lot of noise, and I’m just wondering if that means it’s not only active but one might be trying to surface,” Athelstan finally says. He goes around the boulder and then around a couple half-rotted trees, and then notes a damp marshy spot he’ll have to skirt too. “I know it’s still a few days but twice in a row when there’s not really any other reason for them to be distur—ah!”

A flicker of movement at his feet makes him jump back. He stumbles and drops his phone in catching himself against a nearby tree, and he’s got half the thought that here he is, imagining snakes when he’s in a Scandinavian forest, and that’s when the shiny toothy beartrap snaps up from the leaf-litter.

Athelstan stares at it. Very shiny, he thinks, and then he whirls around just as the man emerging from the bush grabs him by the waist and tosses him into the air.

He screams. He’s not afraid to admit it, he screams, and the world whirls on him and when it finally settles down, he’s crouched on the ground against a tree and he doesn’t have his taser either.

“Watch your step,” says the man in front of him. He looks at Athelstan as if he expects an answer, and when all Athelstan can give him is a few hysterical pants, he tilts his head. His expression looks like he genuinely thinks the change in perspective might help—make sense of Athelstan, make Athelstan make sense, one of those two. “You know you could lose a foot here.”

“What?” Athelstan gasps in a thin, screechy voice.

The man tilts his head back the other way, then takes a half-step back and kicks at something: a second bear-trap. That Athelstan had almost stepped into.

“Well, are those supposed to be here?” Athelstan croaks.

“It’s a forest,” the man says, blinking. He looks right, then left, and then back at Athelstan. “There could be bears.”

Athelstan pants at him. The man smiles. It’s a little mocking, but it’s also oddly hopeful, as if he thinks this might be a satisfactory explanation. He’s very tall and very blond and very blue-eyed, even in the gathering dusk. His hair’s a little odd, shaved on the sides to show tattooing while the long top strands are pulled back into a braided ponytail. From his accented English, he’s clearly a local.

“Oh,” Athelstan finally says. He presses his lips together, then wipes at them—all his panting’s covered them disgustingly with spit—and looks around. His phone is nearby, thankfully.

“There could be more,” says the man, just as Athelstan starts to reach for it. Athelstan freezes and the man’s shoulders hitch. Then he grins and shakes his head and stoops down to pick up the phone. He tosses it once in his hand, then pitches it into Athelstan’s lap, probably judging—correctly—that Athelstan isn’t about to catch it. “You get reception out here?”

“No,” Athelstan says, and then grimaces. He’s a bad liar at the best of times, and he literally was having a conversation seconds ago. He busies himself with rubbing the dirt off his phone. “I mean, yes, but it’s not—it’s spotty, of course, and—oh, well, thank you. For not letting me step in those.”

“You’re welcome,” the man says.

At least his phone fell on a dry patch. The dirt brushes off quite easily and when Athelstan thumbs at it, it seems to power up all right. The back has a few more scratches—he really needs to get a new case—but otherwise no harm done. 

When Athelstan looks up, the man is still there, but squatting and holding Athelstan’s taser. He realizes Athelstan’s watching and lifts his head to show an almost-conspiratorial grin. “What is this?” he says.

Even Athelstan’s atrophied social-interaction skills know he knows the answer to that. “For bears,” Athelstan says.

The man’s eyes widen slightly, and then his grin does the same; he seems impressed, even if Athelstan’s face is flaming. “Where are you from?” he says. “You sound English.”

“I am English,” Athelstan mutters. He pushes himself up onto his knee, tucking his phone away, and then puts his hand out for the taser. “My name’s Athelstan.”

“Ragnar,” the man says, his eyes flicking down to Athelstan’s hand.

He leans forward as if to pass the taser, then grabs Athelstan’s wrist instead and pulls them both to their feet. Athelstan stumbles again and Ragnar drops his wrist and grabs him by the back of his shirt and yanks him steady.

“So what are you doing here, Athelstan?” Ragnar says, still fingering the taser with his free hand. “You’re not hunting for bears.”

“No, obviously, that one doesn’t get high enough voltage for you,” Athelstan says, and then knows that was the absolute wrong thing to say just by how Ragnar goes still.

The other man had been turning away, as if he was going to leave, but before Athelstan can even gasp, he’s been shoved up against a tree with Ragnar’s giant hand closed implacably around his throat. Athelstan grabs Ragnar’s wrist with both hands and can’t even get his fingertips wedged in. Ragnar’s leaning in so close that Athelstan can smell his breath and it’s got that sweetish, slightly metallic smell of blood on it. The man growls something that Athelstan can’t even understand but the sheer guttural force of it makes Athelstan’s toes try to curl where they’re scrabbling up against the tree-trunk.

“Wh—what,” Athelstan squeezes out.

Ragnar just glares at him, eyes blazing, and for a moment Athelstan’s afraid that he’s so angry he doesn’t even realize Athelstan doesn’t know Norwegian.

That’s when the crows suddenly start to scream, directly above them. 

The sky goes dark. Ragnar’s already twisting around, his grip loosening as he stares about at the bizarre darkness. He sniffs sharply, then mutters something else in Norwegian, something considerably less furious.

“Get—” Athelstan chokes. “Get d—”

Frowning, Ragnar turns back to him, and that’s when the black tentacles stream down from the sky.

Ragnar throws them both sideways, which avoids the one going for the tree he’d been smashing Athelstan against, and then lets go of Athelstan and dives for one of the beartraps. He wrenches it open with his bare hands and slams its teeth against another tentacle, which is a terrible idea even if he wasn’t retching so hard that it skews his aim and the teeth don’t even stick. It’s still enough to get the attention of Her young and the tentacles instantly converge on him. Snarling, fur bristling all over his head and shoulders and arms, Ragnar puts up clawed hands but he’s obviously got no hope.

Athelstan doesn’t have time to get his phone out so he does it the old-fashioned way, throwing his arms out and his head back and singing his verses from the Pnakotic Manuscripts from memory. His throat’s still getting over Ragnar’s grip so his tonals are all over the place but thankfully, for this particular banishing chant, the glottal stops are what are important and having a half-crushed windpipe is actually fine for that.

Her wayward Young shrieks and pulls its tentacles up so that the treetops sway alarmingly. Some of them are doubled nearly in two and Athelstan hops around, trying to guess which way they’re going to break.

He guesses completely wrong, but before he’s smashed into a fine leaf-studded paste, someone pulls him out of the way. And then the sky is clear and the crows have stopped calling, and he and Ragnar are sprawled out on the forest floor, surrounded by broken-matchstick trunks and pools of tarry black slime and the occasional sulfurous puff of mist.

Athelstan tries to catch his breath, then recalls what had been happening right before and scrambles several meters away from Ragnar, who turns his head but just watches with a dazed look. He gets up onto one hand and knee, coughing, and then checks that he has his phone. He does. Also, Gunnhild’s texted him: _I am coming._

 _Its fine it wasnt even growing heads yet,_ he texts back, and then he shakes himself and exits the text app and goes into one of his defensive apps instead. “Just so you know, I have absolutely no problem with werefolk but also I’m here for an academic survey, not for a vendetta,” he spills out, getting his phone’s glowing purple screen up between himself and Ragnar. “This isn’t even claimed land, and anyway, I put in all the proper notices and have a diplomatic pass.”

Ragnar looks at Athelstan. Then Athelstan’s phone. Then at the nearest puddle of slime. Then, as if his head hurts, he presses his hand against it. He takes a breath, his eyes widening and then relaxing, and then he looks back at Athelstan. “Were…folk?” he says.

“Or, well, your preferred—preferred nomenclature. I thought that that one was acceptable here,” Athelstan stammers.

“Oh. Oh, right, that’s fine,” Ragnar says with a dismissive wave of his hand. He goes back to looking at the puddles of slime. “So…that thing. You’re fine with that?”

“What? No! I just shut the gate!” Athelstan says, outraged. Then, as Ragnar continues to look expectantly at him, he translates into lay terms. “I want to get rid of things like that.”

“ _Oh_.” Ragnar pulls his knees up and lays an arm across them. Leans forward, sniffs cautiously, and then jerks his head over. He gets up onto his feet using the same motion, then bends over and hacks up a gobbet of spit into the brush. Wipes his mouth and then turns to Athelstan, using the same hand to make a little come-here wave. “This is interesting. Tell me more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been trying to write _Vikings_ since the TV series first came out and just couldn't figure out a hook that worked for me. This is finally what I landed on, and eventually, Athelstan and Stiles are going to meet because what _Of Werewolves and Tentacles_!Stiles really needs is a fellow geek who isn't of the super-inbred, racist, Miskatonic legacy-admissions type. But first, some backstory.
> 
> As far as Cthulhu Mythos goes, I'm playing more in the Clark Ashton Smith and Ramsey Campbell end of things.


	2. Chapter 2

Athelstan attempts to explain that they shouldn’t stay put in what’s now a grade-four penetration site, given the potential for a repeat breach, and Ragnar cheerfully says they’ll go to his camp instead. When Athelstan tries to nix that by pointing out his local guide is coming and she’s a tenth-generation sorceress, Ragnar says camp is definitely the place because they can’t entertain guests without food.

“I have a _cabin_ ,” Athelstan says, exasperated.

Which he probably shouldn’t be, seeing as aside from being a were-something, Ragnar appears to be made out of muscled muscle, but wonder of wonders, the man stops. “Really?” he says.

“Really,” Athelstan says, pointing.

“Then we’ll go to your place,” Ragnar says, right before throwing his head back and howling.

This is how Athelstan ends up with Ragnar and Ragnar’s wife, Lagertha, tsking over his stove. “You are going to burn through wood twice as fast with this shoddy stacking,” Lagertha says.

“It is really very small too,” Ragnar agrees. “You can’t put a log in that.”

“I’m not staying here through the winter,” Athelstan sighs.

Lagertha turns around and narrows her eyes at him. She’s shorter than him, but at no point has Athelstan thought he has the remotest chance against her. When Ragnar had introduced him, she’d sniffed, looked hard at Athelstan, and then turned and given her husband the same look before asking if that was Athelstan the English student from the immigration alert. Athelstan hasn’t gotten to see the color of her eye-glow, but given it’s been about an hour and Ragnar is still favoring the leg she’d kicked when he’d sheepishly said yes, Athelstan assumes they’re a mated alpha pair.

“This will do for now,” she says, and then starts to sit at his dining table. “Tell us about these things in our woods.”

“Oh, right,” Athelstan says, grabbing at his books that are scattered across the table. 

He moves them out of the way, whistles to disarm his electric pentacle—he’d forgotten he’d set that up—and folds that up, then pulls over his laptop. Ghostly tentacles reach out of the screen and he jumps, then remembers he’d left it logged into the library portal and guiltily mutters in Aklo. Tentacles gone, he sits down at the table, turns the laptop so that the other two can see it, and types in his password to unlock the screen.

“So as you can see from this spectrographic analysis, the cosmic color ratio in the local flora has been trending into purple territory for a few weeks now. Decadal fluctuations aren’t uncommon—” Athelstan pulls up a historical plot analysis “—but the slope is unusual, and that combined with the opinion of the local shieldmaiden unit—”

“Shieldmaiden unit?” Lagertha says.

Athelstan grimaces. “Right, sorry, that’s a bit regressive these days with modern sexuality, even if it’s the historical—anyway, the local Elder patrol—”

“Why is purple the color when things are bad?” Ragnar asks.

“Because,” Athelstan says, frowning, and then he stops and looks at them.

Ragnar and Lagertha look patiently back, and for the first time, Athelstan notices how they’re dressed: nothing that would look out of place on an experienced hunter or camper, but it all looks very…new. Not obnoxiously so—again, they clearly were buying for function and not form—but new. Which is odd for local werewolves.

“Do you…” Athelstan swallows and can’t help noticing the way Ragnar’s eyes flick to his throat “…do you have any idea what I just said?”

Lagertha doesn’t exactly look at Ragnar, but she does tilt her head his way. He moves his shoulder nearest her in a little dismissive roll. “Explain as if we don’t,” she says, without a trace of insecurity in her voice.

“Right,” Athelstan says slowly. He glances at his laptop, but it’s not as if he can look up how to politely tell two werewolves he’d like to know how insane he’s going to sound to them before he starts to sound insane. “Well. Stop me whenever you’d like to ask a question.”

“We’ll do that,” Ragnar says, grinning.

He’s very casually letting his canines show, and Athelstan is suddenly recalling that he doesn’t know where his taser went in all the fuss. “Ah, so…to start with, there are aliens.”

“Who hate people?” Ragnar says.

“No, not really, it’s more they just don’t think very much of us at all. It’s rather like what you think of that patch of _Cladonia rangiferina_ you kicked off the back step,” Athelstan says. “Lichen, I mean.”

“Never mind him,” Lagertha says, as Ragnar frowns and twists around and actually goes to the back door to peer through the panes. “The aliens.”

“Yes, the aliens. They exist in dimensions besides human dimensions, and occasionally they cross over into our dimensions, except because they aren’t adapted for this dimension, a crossover event usually results in ecological and psychological pollution,” Athelstan says, though he can’t help tracking Ragnar as the man checks two panes, backs off, and then cracks the door open for a cautious sniff at the outside air. “I say psychological because they are intelligent and they are aware of humankind, but they, well, they basically drive people insane upon contact. It’s still up for debate—technically, though the ’63 Brichester symposium really should have settled it—whether that’s intentional on their part or whether they can actually comprehend us enough to consciously manipulate—”

Ragnar comes back. “I have a question.”

Lagertha, who had been listening with apparent intentness, raises her foot. Ragnar hops back behind Athelstan’s chair, though he’s smiling, and then his breath is suddenly puffing at Athelstan’s ear. Athelstan yelps.

“Sorry,” Ragnar says, his hand coming down to clamp Athelstan’s shoulder. He’s still breathing on Athelstan’s ear. “The tentacles that were coming out of your computer, they looked just like the—”

“Oh, that’s not them, that’s just the Brichester University firewall,” Athelstan says, and then he realizes that probably means nothing to them. “That is, yes, it does look the same, but for some reason no matter how you program, it just comes out tentacles or so IT tells me, that’s just an artifact of having to extend into Great Old One—that’s what we call the aliens—”

“Great Old One,” Lagertha repeats thoughtfully. “I would not have expected that for a name, not the way Ragnar described them.”

Athelstan sighs. “Well, sometimes this line of work is very literal. They’re very, very old, and very, very…”

“Great?” Ragnar says. He’s suddenly away from Athelstan and over by the door again.

“In the old-fashioned sense of the word, yes, I think that’s a fair way to describe them,” Athelstan says, and then he sees one of the minimized windows on his laptop is flashing.

Specifically, the window with the real-time feed from the scanning satellites. Athelstan pops it up, zooms in on the newest hot spot, and then clicks to convert the GPS to Google Map coordinates.

“You had a guide coming,” Ragnar says.

“Well, not from that direction,” Athelstan mutters, though he’s already pulled his phone out to text Gunnhild. “Oh, wait, is it just you two, or do you have more pack—”

“Why?” Lagertha says sharply. When he looks up, she hasn’t raised her hands from the chair but she clearly means to if she doesn’t like his answer.

Athelstan swallows hard, and then tips his phone so she can see the screen. “My guide’s also part of the local Elder—it’s a longstanding group that looks out for Great Old One intrusions and has taken responsibility for controlling them in this area for centuries. If your pack needs to be evacuated, she can help. They’re not hunters. Neither am I, by the way—actually, weres make up about six percent of the student body at Brichester, last I checked.”

“Oh,” Lagertha says. She blinks hard, then slews around to look at Ragnar, who is giving the back door serious enough consideration that Athelstan reaches for his keys, in case the man starts to just break it down. “Well, no, that wouldn’t be our pack. The rest of them are in Hedeby.”

“I think it’s Horik,” Ragnar mutters, and then suddenly faces Athelstan. “If it takes you, it is only that you go insane? Or do you make it stronger?”

“Well, that’s a more genuine debate in my opinion,” Athelstan says.

Ragnar’s right eye twitches, though then he smiles almost regretfully. “Let’s save the debate for later, when there’s time to enjoy it,” he says. “First, an answer.”

“Ah…well, it’s an offspring of Shub-Niggurath and they do have a documented growth cycle and…I, ah, I didn’t actually get enough time to figure out _when_ in the cycle this one might be at, even though it’s clearly juvenile and—”

Ragnar’s eye twitches again. He and Lagertha look at each other, then at Athelstan. Then Lagertha twists Ragnar’s arm, just as he starts impatiently forward. She smiles in what she probably thinks is a reassuring manner, if she wasn’t flexing her fingers against Ragnar’s tight biceps in a way that highlights her own muscle tone. “What we want to know is, if that thing out there runs into an…enemy of ours, what will happen?”

“Oh, are you in the middle of a vendetta?” Athelstan asks.

Staring.

The thing is, Athelstan regrettably recalls, he’s never really spent much time with the werewolf contingent of Brichester University’s student population. He specialized into xenobotany quite early, and between that—not a popular major with the were-carnivores—and the after-effects of his time in Averoigne, he’s only really met them at the occasional were-pride event. Which probably isn’t the best environment for learning day-to-day social skills.

“I didn’t mean to be rude, obviously it’s not my business,” Athelstan says. Then grimaces. “Well, I suppose unless it is because they’re coming to kill you.”

“They’re coming to kill us,” Ragnar confirms.

Athelstan sighs. Gunnhild and the rest of the Elder Patrol are never going to rent to him again—his dissertation advisor made it very clear to him how much diplomatic arm-twisting went into this sabbatical and he’ll be lucky if they even continue to talk to Brichester. “Do they know anything about the Great Old Ones?”

“No,” Lagertha says, still watching him closely.

“What about magic generally?” Athelstan asks.

“No,” Ragnar says, while Lagertha nods. They exchange another one of those looks and Ragnar’s eye twitches at the same time the corner of his mouth ticks into what’s probably not a smile. “Just because he calls on the old gods does not mean he knows anything about what to do with them. He’s just coming to kill us.”

“Oh, all right, well, we can put up the perimeter shields here and then I can activate the Patrol so they can get ready to contain it as soon as the Young finishes feeding, and that’s about it without having to leave here,” Athelstan says, abandoning his keys and bringing his phone up again. This Horik’s close enough that alerts are starting to ping, and he really needs to do something about it before the automated spells kick in.

Before he can, a large hand covers his phone. When he looks up, Ragnar is frowning at him. “Why would we feed Horik to that thing if you want to make it weaker?”

“He might not be the most skilled in magic, but he is very large,” Lagertha says, though she seems slightly more interested in what Athelstan has to say. “And strong.”

Ragnar snorts, but doesn’t vocally disagree with her. Just fixes his very, very blue eyes on Athelstan. He still has hold of Athelstan’s phone, and he doesn’t seem inclined to let go, even though the light is starting to change.

“Oh, I suppose you’re thinking of were transference of alpha power, yes? Well, it’s not quite the same, eating him might make the Young incrementally stronger, but it also makes it much more…ah, made up of elements of this dimension. So actually, in a way, it becomes easier to deal with. I’m, um, hand-waving a lot right now, I realize that, but I really…need to…”

And then Athelstan just gives up and dives for the remote panel on the wall. He frantically punches buttons until he feels the cool wash of the cabin’s shielding, then steps back and promptly grabs a knee as the world swings. Catches up on his breath, then glimpses the sky outside the nearest window: it’s striped in shades of sickly green and purple, colors that always helped his students intuitively understand the meaning of the word ‘eldritch.’

Cursing, Athelstan runs to the front and then the back door, hopping someone’s leg along the way, and checks the locks. When he’s sure they’re set, he bangs the chimney on the wood stove, waits to hear the clicks, and then flops down to respond back to the series of texts flooding in from Gunnhild. Yes, he’s fine, his guests are still there, no, they don’t need to be secured, no, he doesn’t have a sightline on the Young and doesn’t plan to, yes, the ones about to be eaten would have had to go past the warning signs…

He looks up. “You did see the signs around here, right?”

“The signs?” Ragnar says. He and Lagertha are tucked into each other in the center of the room, taking turns at glancing through the windows. They’re staying fairly calm, but occasionally one will stroke their hand down the other’s arm, and their nails are looking rather pointy. “You mean the ones that said Permits Required? Or the ones that said a vendetta of a thousand generations shall descend on any trespassers?”

“The spirals were a little old-fashioned, I think,” Lagertha adds, though she’s watching Athelstan keenly. “And I would not have put them on birch trees, but would have chosen ash.”

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Athelstan says, her comment twigging a stray bit of Nordic mythology in his mind, and then he refocuses on the fact that he’s sharing space with two strange werewolves. “Ah. Yes, anyway, those signs. You did see them. But you still came in.”

Ragnar shrugs. “This is our land.”

Athelstan just keeps himself from pointing out that the Elder shield has been patrolling this area for the last ten years, and instead just texts Gunnhild back. This time he adds the names of his guests, and she suddenly stops texting.

“If you are curious about why Horik and we are fighting, it is because we were away for a very long time, and when we returned, he was trying to take what was ours, for no reason except that we had been away,” Lagertha suddenly says. She considers something about him and then seems to make up her mind, pushing away from Ragnar and coming over till she’s standing just in front of Athelstan. She smells distinctly woodsy, with a tinge of tree-sap that reminds Athelstan of the lichen he hadn’t been able to corral. “Then he tried to kill our children.”

“You have children?” Athelstan says, immediately trying to get up. “You said you had a camp—”

Lagertha catches him by the elbow. She’s not trying to hurt him but her grip is not going to let him pass. “They are in Hedeby,” she says, leaning forward so he can see her tongue flicking behind her white, large teeth. “Only Ragnar and I came, to settle the matter before it could go any farther.”

“So Horik is going to die?” Ragnar comes loping across the room, an arm thrown over his head to tap first this and then that beam, before he grabs the final one and leans over Athelstan. “You aren’t going out to save him?”

“Well, if you saw the signs, he would have too,” Athelstan says. Then pauses, as something occurs to him.

Ragnar grins. “Oh, we left them where they were. It was interesting. We didn’t think he had done them but we had an appointment with him, so we thought see to that first, and then we would ask who else had taken our land.”

“Ah. Right. Still…he was warned, and he still came here,” Athelstan says. Not as easily as some might, but at this point in his academic career, he’s very aware that if someone doesn’t want their mind to be opened, then there’s very little one can do about it, except put them on the appropriate blacklists. He doesn’t like to think of himself as coldblooded, but he _does_ like being alive, and in his right mind, and unfortunately not everyone even wants to be helped. “I’m not taking sides in your vendetta, mind. It’s simply who’s within range of the shields and who isn’t. If I’d met him first instead of you, he might be the one standing here. And if the Patrol finds him and he asks for it, they’ll help him.”

At that Ragnar makes a face and pushes off the ceiling beams. He turns in place, twitches as his gaze crosses one of the windows, and then deliberately crosses back to the ice-chest. He flips the top up with his boot-tip, sniffs, and scoops out several containers. “I don’t think so,” he mutters. “So, anyway, we are staying for the night?”

“Oh…well, probably. You don’t want to go out too early for this sort of thing,” Athelstan says. He checks the time on his phone, not that that really stops the sinking feeling of reality in his stomach, and sees that Gunnhild’s finally texted him back.

“You need to eat,” Lagertha suddenly announces. When he glances up, blinking, she pulls his shirt up and presses her palm against his stomach. Her fingers are cool and he yelps; unsmiling, she twists them in his shirt and holds him in place so she can sniff at the crook of his neck. “You smell like tea and stale biscuits and tomatoes. That is not enough to live on. We will make dinner.”

“Right,” Athelstan says, glancing from her to his phone—Gunnhild simply says she has heard of the Lothbrok pack—to her to Ragnar, who is silently laughing as he slits a package of meat with a claw. “Well…we do have time. Make yourself at home. Oh, but I did have dinner already.”

Lagertha shoots him a look over her shoulder. Athelstan shuts his mouth, then sighs and retreats to his laptop. He’ll just log in and see what data feeds he can call up, and by then maybe they’ll have eaten and just forgotten about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm rather fond of modern takes on the Cthulhu Mythos that subvert Lovecraft's original idea about the Great Old Ones being the gods of the (implicitly inferior) oppressed and really dig into why someone might want to align with something that drives you mad. For example, maybe it's the same reason people decided to build cities in inhospitable terrain: protection. Anders Fager's "Furies from Boras" is a somewhat darker take on my Elder Patrol idea.
> 
> For those not familiar with TW, werewolves carve messages to each other into convenient objects. A spiral basically is a vow of revenge.


	3. Chapter 3

They do not forget about him, but admittedly, that’s not a hardship when the cooking is as good as this. Athelstan’s not really a foodie—living in France doesn’t automatically make you one, at least when you’re talking about Averoigne—and while Brichester’s very generous with its research stipends, that’s because it expects you to source your own protective charms as its own generally only covers university property. So he’s used to eating just enough to quiet his stomach and keep him from having a blood-sugar crash in the middle of a warding ritual, and not really seeing why he needs to have more than that.

“But I can’t, really, I’m going to explode,” he mumbles, even as he can’t help inhaling over the plate Ragnar is waving in his direction. The plate of glistening, perfectly-seared pork chops surrounded by some sort of warm brown-with-a-golden-sheen sauce.

Ragnar frowns. “You haven’t even had any.”

“But that’s because I had the potatoes…” Athelstan says weakly.

Lagertha reaches over and slaps Ragnar’s wrist, and when he winces, takes the plate from him. She puts it down and cuts one of the chops in half with her knife and fork…and then levers it onto Athelstan’s plate. “Don’t torture him,” she tells Ragnar. “If he can only have half, then he has half.”

He’d be very lucky to do even a quarter, at least without misapplying non-Euclidean geometry. Athelstan stares at the pork, then starts to say so, only to see how both of them are completely focused on him and completely, inhumanly still. They’re waiting, and the moment he reluctantly thinks perhaps just a small bite—

The half-grown offspring of Shub-Niggurath wandering around somewhere in the woods decides to flex reality, hard enough that the cottage’s wards bend. They’re not anywhere near breaking, Athelstan can tell just by the mildness of the nausea that that brief yellow flash induces in him, but still, with the current state of his stomach, it’s still a bit much so he looks over at his laptop. Then frowns and pulls it off the spare chair to take a closer look at the spiking output, only to realize that that’s entirely consistent with the Shield patrol chopping it into little bits.

“Well, that’s interesting, I thought they just tried to push it back and that’s going to stretch out the clean-up, but…” Athelstan says, half to himself, half to the noises going on around him. 

The rather loud, jangly noises, he realizes, just as they stop and Ragnar and Lagertha freeze in place with what looks like _all_ of the kitchen knives in one of their hands, plus a small ax that’s just—appeared. They’re not facing him, but the back door…which looks fine.

Oh.

“Wait— _wait_ , don’t break it!” Athelstan hisses, shoving his laptop back and then nearly dragging the table with him as he tries to get up and stop them. “You’ll just let it in!”

“But—it’s trying to come in,” Ragnar says, gesturing with three knives and an elbow at the rippling wood. He’d look puzzled if his eyes weren’t glowing red coals and his fangs weren’t fully bared. 

Athelstan gets his foot unhooked from the table leg. “No, it’s not, that’s just the wards and they’re completely fine, and anyway the Young’s been cut up and these are just aftershocks, and—look—I suppose the—the waves are a little—take some getting used to but—let me just do some dampening—”

He goes for the floorboards, tapping on the runes till he’s got half a dozen floating around his head, and then adjusts them. One’s a little sluggish and he sighs and pulls out his keychain knife, slashes a fingertip, and flicks blood at it till it moves. The rippling settles down and he does a quick look around the room to make sure he hasn’t disturbed the balance, then catches his breath. Then glances at Ragnar and Lagertha.

They’re still staring. Slightly fewer knives pointed in his direction, but Ragnar is…Athelstan frowns and looks at his hand, and as he realizes the blood’s smeared all over the back of his finger, Ragnar lets out a soft, amused, distinctly shameless noise and keeps staring as Athelstan hurriedly finds a tissue to wrap the finger in. Lagertha doesn’t make any noises but she’s also staring.

“Ah, well, so. You can keep eating,” Athelstan says, when they don’t move. He makes an awkward gesture towards the table. “It was delicious, really, I just can’t…I’m not used to eating this much. But I, ah, I’ll be more than happy to have it for lunch tomorrow?”

“It’ll be cold tomorrow,” Lagertha finally says. She puts the knives away, more of a casual unwind than a turn, and then goes back to the table. “We will cook you something else.”

Athelstan mumbles a thanks, and retrieves his laptop. He has to pass Ragnar, who puts half his knives back but keeps the rest and the ax, and who for a moment seems to bend like the door and walls no longer are, curving so that the heat of his body sweeps an arc along Athelstan from head to toe. Which reminds Athelstan of the _other_ thing that living in the Averoigne region of France didn’t automatically make you, at least if you still wanted to go about sex with any sort of moral bearing.

“I should run some calculations on the aftershocks,” he says, and a few other things, and they’re all very legitimate reasons to excuse himself to the tiny bedroom.

Ragnar nods carelessly, swinging himself back into his chair, and Lagertha kicks his knee. Then leans back, smiling, as he grins through a pained chuff at her, and stretches out one hand for her half-drunk bottle of beer. She picks it up and puts her feet on Ragnar’s lap, and then turns towards Athelstan.

“Do you want anything before you go?” she asks. Pauses, beer bottle dangling from her fingers, its straight sides bearing directly down towards her ample…when he drags his eyes back up, the pink tip of her tongue just flicks past her lips as if she can taste the heat in his cheeks.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Athelstan manages to strangle out, and then he retreats.

It is a good ten minutes before he actually is reading what’s in front of him on the screen, and then another five before mentally converting numbers to Carnacki spheres bores him enough that he absentmindedly opens up the lichen catalog file he’d started earlier. Not _quite_ a record, but…his advisor had had a point, he thinks, shrinking down in his chair—with the door shut but Ragnar’s and Lagertha’s occasional laughter still coming through, down to the husky vowels—he really _had_ needed time off.

Well, clean-up would finish in approximately twelve hours, and then there’d be no reason to keep them and they probably won’t want to meet Gunnhild, if he’d been reading the room right. In the meantime, he really should finish up the catalog file before he completely forgets everything, seeing as it isn’t likely he’ll get that sample back at this point.

* * *

At some point, Athelstan falls asleep in the middle of his work. This is common.

However, when he wakes up, he is smothered in warm bodies. This is _not_ common.

Athelstan moves his arm. The bodies lying on him go still so he goes still. Then they start breathing again and…he isn’t exactly convinced but he needs to check something, so he slips his arm the rest of the way out from under Ragnar’s torso and drags his laptop over from where it’s been scooted against the bed leg. He wakes it up and fills out the standard Brichester sanity spot-check questionnaire, and it comes back as ninety-five percent sane. He stares at the soft blue check mark on the screen, then tries to roll over without thinking about it.

Ragnar grunts, hitches up so that his knee jams into the bottom of Athelstan’s ribcage, and then slowly humps into a comfortable position centered over Athelstan’s other arm. Lagertha slides _up_ Athelstan’s chest, then catches herself, blinking slowly, as he barely averts her nipple running into his mouth because they are. Are naked. 

“What are you doing?” Lagertha asks, after propping herself up on one arm. Behind her, Ragnar snorts again, then flops over with a huff so his head appears over her shoulder.

“Checking something,” Athelstan says, willing himself to focus on the runes swirling into and out of existence on the ceiling.

Lagertha looks up. “Is it back?”

She doesn’t move beyond that, but the sharpness of her tone drags Athelstan’s eyes off the runes and onto her. Then to Ragnar, who bolts upright into a crouch as if he means to lunge into the next room.

“Er, the Young?” Athelstan asks. “Well, no, I don’t—but let me check—”

Ragnar frowns and twists around. “I thought you were doing that?”

“No, this is the—” Athelstan belatedly realizes how this will sound but blushing alone won’t stop his mouth “—check for what reality. This is. That is.”

“You…thought we are in a new reality?” Lagertha asks.

Finally having realized muscles will stop his mouth, Athelstan yanks his jaw shut and nods. And now that both of his arms are free, pushes himself back up against the footboard and pulls his laptop in front of himself. “Ah, yes, it’s unfortunately a side-effect of Great Old One penetration—” not the word to use now “—er, breaches into our reality, since they go both ways. Breaches. Anyway, that is, that’s not to say that the shielding here has been breached in any way since I can see that it hasn’t and—”

Ragnar relaxes into his crouch, one hand casually adjusting his…as Athelstan averts his eyes, he can feel sweat starting to trickle down the side of his face. And the way Ragnar is staring at said trickle.

“Is it gone?” Lagertha asks, interrupting Athelstan’s spiraling sense of impropriety to…use his crooked arm as a resting place for her very soft, warm, full breast. He jerks his eyes up to find her looking quite seriously at him. “The sky earlier—it _split_ and it was like…”

She lifts her hand and Ragnar grunts, then rolls his shoulders in a way that seems meant to genuinely settle himself, and not to just highlight certain body parts. “You could see into it, the split. It wasn’t good, what’s inside it. Those things can keep it.”

“We pulled the curtains but it still felt as if they—you could see it,” Lagertha picks up. She presses her lips together, then nudges him. “This is the only room with shutters.”

“Oh. Oh…sorry. If I’d known, I could have—I can go throw some extra runes on the bathroom curtains if you two would like the bed,” Athelstan says, preparing to bundle up his laptop cord.

Ragnar sighs. This earns him a look from Lagertha, which he ignores in favor of putting his hands behind his back and stretching his arms out, knees swinging wide open as his pectorals strain prominently. Then he lets his arms fall forward; the backs of his hands smack casually against his hips. “Do _you_ want to go to bed?” he says.

Athelstan blinks. “Er, no, I just woke up.”

Lagertha growls. At least, Athelstan thinks that that’s what she does. He can’t hear it but she seems to tremble where she’s pressing against him and Ragnar twitches and then Lagertha’s pulling herself around to face Athelstan, hand on his arm where the warmth of her breast had only just been, that breast rising like cream on fresh milk and she’s smiling at him when he sucks his breath and looks up.

“We like you,” she says. Her other hand suddenly makes itself known on his thigh, high up, bumping at his laptop so he grabs it to keep it from falling off rather than at her. “And you like us, Athelstan. We can—”

Werewolves, right, and suddenly Athelstan comes back to himself. Her cleavage and Ragnar’s genitals are rather more potent mental traps than the nauseating whirl of a Great Old One, but mental traps are mental traps. “I know you can smell it, but I’m very sorry and it’s just not going to be possible,” he says, twisting himself out from between her and the footboard.

Lagertha’s lips thin and for a moment he thinks she might hold him, but she doesn’t even try to tighten her grip. She just lets him go, frowning, as he trips a little over his computer cord and then bends backward to pull the plug out of the outlet, and then edges around the far side of the bed so he can start working towards the gap between the doorway and Ragnar. Who is also looking puzzled, with rather more frustration than Lagertha.

“Why not?” he all-but-demands of Athelstan. “We’re here, this house is safe, we ate, and you like us. You’ll like it, I promise.”

“I’m sure you’re very good at it, I’m not arguing about that,” Athelstan says, though he’s honestly starting to be a little annoyed. Every single time, this argument goes the same way. “But I just can’t have sex with you.”

“What, are you not allowed?” Ragnar snorts. He glances around, then, as Lagertha belatedly growls at him, twists over and hooks something from the floor and—oh, fantastic, he’s found _that_ bag, because Athelstan figured he had eight months to unpack and that one could wait. “Then what is _this_ for?”

Athelstan resigns himself to having his face burn off, and just looks at the thick, ridged dildo Ragnar’s pulled out. “Pleasuring myself, obviously.”

Ragnar pauses. Cocks his head. Does not deliver the usual rejoinder.

“So I don’t have to have sex with other people,” Athelstan makes himself continue. “Because—actually, excuse me, I’d rather not explain everything to people I barely know. You’re certainly free to pursue your own preferences, just please remember the sheets are under the bed, the winter duvet’s what’s in the chest at the end, and…please sanitize that before you put it back. Thank you.”

And then he scoots himself out the doorway, while the naked werewolves are still looking too baffled to go after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For purposes of the Cthulhu Mythos, Averoigne is not the same as the actual (in our reality) Auvergne. It's a region in France that Clark Ashton-Smith invented so he could throw Great Old Ones into the mix with medieval black magic and stuff like vampires and demons.
> 
> Brichester's similarly fake, by way of Ramsey Campbell.


	4. Chapter 4

Athelstan barely has set up his laptop in the kitchen when his phone rings. From the bedroom. He stoops over the table, hands pushed against the edge and head hanging down, and then he sighs and turns around.

“I think this is for you,” Lagertha says, coming out with it just as he comes up to the doorway.

“You’re dressed,” Athelstan says. Because she is.

Lagertha looks a little hard at him, but before she can say whatever she’s clearly thinking, his phone goes off again. He grimaces and takes it from her and answers it, because he’s ninety-nine percent sure it’s Gunnhild, and he’s right.

 _“We pushed it back,”_ she says. _“Growing too quickly.”_

“I saw the signature, I suppose you really couldn’t do anything else,” Athelstan says, wandering semi-absently away from Lagertha. “Do you need an extra hand to seal things up?”

 _“No,”_ Gunnhild says.

A sharp hiss catches Athelstan mid-step and he pulls his foot back, only to lose his balance and stumble against the wall. He misses the decorative antlers mounted on it, thankfully, and turns around to see Ragnar, also dressed, and making a face and hand-gestures at him as if Athelstan’s lost his mind. Athelstan frowns, then doesn’t ask and instead looks where Ragnar’s pointing…at the front door?

Oh. Right, Gunnhild also said she’d come to them. “It’s fine,” Athelstan says, and reaches over and pulls it open. “It’s gone, the Shield ended up banishing the—”

Something huge and dark suddenly rears up in the doorway and _none of the wards go off_. Athelstan yelps and hops backward and a silver thing whistles past his ear and blood suddenly spits all over the floor, just short of him and. And.

“Don’t move,” Ragnar says wearily, walking past Athelstan. He leans down, grabs the ax-handle and wrenches the head free of the—the head, and then chops down twice. Pauses, head cocked, and then straightens up. “Borg.”

“As in _Star Trek_?” Athelstan stammers.

Ragnar leans halfway out the doorway, but not before he flashes Athelstan a grin. “No, there’s only one of him. But…then again, you wouldn’t want to have his mind take yours over either.”

Athelstan stares at the dead werewolf lying half-in the cottage. Then brings his phone around and dazedly thumbs at his apps till he gets a ping. He blinks. “He’s _not_ been touched by the Young.”

 _“What was touched?”_ says Gunnhild.

“Oh, sorry, there was a—” Athelstan puts the phone back to his ear, then skitters out of the way as Lagertha goes to join Ragnar at sniffing at the outside. “A werewolf.”

 _“You had two,”_ Gunnhild says after a moment. _“Ragnar and Lagertha, you said. And we found the other one, Horik.”_

“Well, there’s another one,” Athelstan says. “Another, other one, that is. Was, that is. He’s dead.”

Lagertha turns back and comes up to Athelstan, clearly listening. Gunnhild isn’t saying anything, at least not anything that’s audible to him, but somehow the skepticism is clearly communicated both to him and to Lagertha. “Can I?” Lagertha says, putting her hand out. She pauses and shifts a little nearer. “I am a werewolf, after all.”

“Ah…” Athelstan says, because the logic doesn’t quite parse, and Lagertha takes the phone from him while he wastes time trying to sort that out.

She immediately starts speaking in Norwegian. She’s calm, as far as he can tell, and when Gunnhild responds, she doesn’t sound particularly upset or even surprised to be passed off. They exchange a few words and then Lagertha hands the phone back.

“She wants to ask us how many,” Lagertha says, partly to him and partly to Ragnar, who appears to have decided things are clear enough to grab Borg’s legs and drag him out of the cottage.

Ragnar looks up as Borg’s caved-in head jounces over the threshold, spilling brains back onto the floor. “How many?” he repeats, not sounding pleased.

“She is part of this Shield. It is her land, and they are on it,” Lagertha points out.

In answer, Ragnar rolls his eyes and pulls Borg the rest of the way out. He steps back in, dusting off his hands, and then looks at the streak of bloody brain matter on the floor. “Well, if we are expecting visitors, we should prepare,” he says.

“Shouldn’t we—” Athelstan starts, and then he falters as they both turn towards him “—you don’t—you’re not worried—”

“Oh, Borg? No, if he’s not part of your Great Old Ones, he won’t have anyone following him,” Ragnar says. He edges around the bloodstain, using the side of his foot to cut off a rivulet that’s making its way towards the nearest rug, and then stoops to pick up a bucket from under a table. “So this magic of yours, it doesn’t work on werewolves?”

“No, it does, I just turned it off for you two,” Athelstan says, suddenly realizing.

Ragnar looks up sharply. “You might want to turn it back on.”

“Right,” Athelstan says slowly. He’s starting to realize a few other things. “When you said ‘they’ were coming to kill you—you only mentioned the one by name, but…”

“We will talk about it when Gunnhild arrives,” Lagertha says, as she serenely trades Ragnar a dishtowel for the bucket. “She is only a few minutes away, and it will be easier to tell the story once than twice.”

Athelstan opens his mouth to say…something along the lines that he had _not_ factored this into his sabbatical plans, or his visa application, or, come to think of it, his paperwork with Brichester. Which rather honestly sets his priorities, he sees with sudden clarity.

“Right,” he says. He steps over to the doorway and fiddles with some of the runes, only to wince when they flare blue. “Wait, are you—are you sure he was _just_ a werewolf? That is, not to say that he has any Cthulhic traces on him, but…”

Ragnar and Lagertha pause and look at each other. “He spoke often of his dead wife,” Lagertha says slowly. “Actually, he claimed he spoke _with_ her.”

“Oh! Earthly-based spirits, that would certainly account for it,” Athelstan says, getting back to work.

He shores up and adjusts the shielding, prodding his phone at some of the runes when they’re sluggish to warp in the way he wants them to. The blood on the floor’s throwing up some interference, but not nearly enough to…he steps back, checking his phone, and then sighs when he sees he’s accounted for that and the recent expulsion of the Young but not the simple fact that the cottage now has three bodies and not one. 

Once he’s included that, the wards settle down. He steps back, absently skipping to the side when Ragnar hisses about stepping on the blood, and studies his work. It’s a bit ratty, but it should hold for now. Anyway, if he wants to polish it up any more, he’ll have to get some things out of his luggage that will certainly make Brichester’s Office of Foreign Activations sit up and take notice.

He does have to call them anyway, he thinks. He’s not particularly anxious to, but…best to get it over with. The more notice he can give, the more his mentor’s going to be able to finesse things and he will need a fair amount of that.

A _significant_ amount, he silently corrects, as Ragnar and Lagertha both kneel to start scrubbing at the bloodstains. “There’s some fluid-specific cleaner under the sink,” he says while placing a call to Brichester’s main campus. “The blood one should be the—oh! Sorry, I know it’s terribly early for you—”

 _“Nonsense, my dear boy, nonsense, you know that I never let a little thing like business hours stand in the way of urgent business,”_ his mentor booms down the line. _“Besides, I was just about to ring you, what with these reports I’ve been getting from—”_

Athelstan almost winces his way into tripping over one of Ragnar’s feet, and then stumbles into the pool of blood. “I’m so sorry, truly, I know I must have put Gunnhild and the rest of the shieldmaidens out to no end—”

 _“It’s all in their charter, I have absolutely no worries about that. If anything, she’s been very complimentary about your promptness and ability to recall basic containment protocol!”_ his mentor says cheerfully, as Athelstan hops on one foot to avoid staining the rugs too. _“Don’t fret about the Norwegians, that’s what we have diplomatic channels for. Now, what I do want to know is whether you think you need arrangements back.”_

“Back?” Athelstan repeats dumbly.

Something has his foot, he realizes a moment later. He’s no longer hopping. He glances down just as Lagertha releases his ankle. Then sighs, and catches his knee, and steadies him against the unexpected loss of his shoe, which Ragnar has so he can mop at the sole.

 _“Well, Athelstan, you are supposed to be on a sabbatical,”_ his mentor is saying. At some point he’s sobered up and even sounds concerned, which is not a good sign. Not that Athelstan faults the man for caring, of course, but when the Dean cares, the likelihood of an international incident goes up sharply and Athelstan just really wasn’t looking to attract that kind of attention. _“And yes, I remember you’re doing it at a celestial-grade site and this is your chosen area of study, but I also recall specifically approving it on the basis that the Elder Shields have by far the best intervention track record—”_

“Which they’ve certainly lived up to, I can assure you based on immediate firsthand experience,” Athelstan tries to break in. At the same time, he heads to the luggage in the bedroom and starts jerking open zippers and pulling out tools. “I know the timing’s, ah, unfortunate, but really, I don’t think—”

 _“—and I have to be brutally honest with you, and not just because I am overseeing your research, but also because I genuinely value you as a person, Athelstan,”_ the longest-serving Dean of Brichester University goes on. _“What with all the lack of clarity with EU immigration rules, we just can’t afford another Vyones this semester. Next semester, possibly, but this semester, I need all the trust-fund foreign students I can get.”_

Athelstan bites back his first reply, which is that Vyones wasn’t even his fault, even the _French_ had admitted that and when the French—even if it was Averoigne where they considered Basques to be upstart newcomers—admitted the English were right, University security worked overtime to confirm no unauthorized manipulations of reality had occurred. And his second, which is that if a textbook descent of the Young is enough to worry people, he might as well look into transferring to America where accidental breaches into Cthulhic dimensions are considered CV-enhancers.

 _“Now, I know you’ve been looking forward to this, and I haven’t forgotten what your application said about the dire lack of comparative analysis of mutations in indicator species. But we need things to stay quiet this month, is all. Just until all the deposits are in,”_ his mentor says. _“I am sorry, Athelstan, but that is how it is.”_

“No, I completely understand, sir,” Athelstan finally says. “And of course I’ll do whatever is best for the University, but it was honestly just coincidence that the Young came through and I’m certainly not out there exacerbating anything. Or encouraging anything. So I don’t think I need to come back yet. I’ll—I’ll keep it quieter around here.”

 _“Excellent!”_ his mentor says, back to cheerful booming. _“I have no doubt in your sense of discretion. Now, none of that ‘sir’ stuff with me, you know I don’t require that with my few true friends.”_

Athelstan swallows another sigh. “Yes, s—Ecbert.”

 _“Good. Go back to your sabbatical, and I don’t want to hear another thing from you till you’re back,”_ Ecbert says, hanging up.

Muttering a few curses to himself, Athelstan thumbs his phone to ‘sleep’ and then looks down at his bags. He briefly thinks about not doing it, and then digs back into them.

“Athelstan?” Ragnar’s standing in the doorway, bloody rags in hand.

“If you can’t find it, I’ll be done in a second and I’ll show you which bottle,” Athelstan mutters, barely looking up.

“No, I think we found it,” Ragnar says, and when Athelstan looks up, the other man squirts the rags in his hand, then gives them a little shake. Then watches with a bemused look as the bloodstains slowly fade out of existence. “Useful.”

“Good,” Athelstan says. When the other man doesn’t leave, Athelstan barely reminds himself this is an alpha werewolf and no matter how much entity-banishing gear he has, it probably still isn’t wise to antagonize the man when they’re in close quarters. “Can I help you?”

That earns him a long, difficult-to-read look from Ragnar. At first he wants to say that it’s impatient, and then he remembers what they’d been arguing about before the latest casualty and he flushes a little. Ragnar notices, tilting his head, his expression going a little more amused. But it can’t be impatience, just from the fact that the man seems to be _waiting_ on him.

“Do we need to get rid of Borg?” Ragnar finally asks.

“Oh, the body? Ah—no. No, definitely not, Gunnhild’s going to want to see it since they’ll be the ones signing off on all the paperwork,” Athelstan says.

Ragnar’s brows rise. “Paperwork?”

“I can take care of it,” Athelstan immediately says. “That is, if you’re worried about your names getting—”

“I am not worried,” Ragnar says, that odd look on his face again. It’s…a little as if whatever expression Athelstan is wearing is giving him the same problem, although how that could be the case, Athelstan couldn’t fathom. He knows what his strengths are and hiding his emotions isn’t one of them. “It was a well-known vendetta and our people would not be concerned about it.”

There’s a little bit of stress on the ‘our,’ which Athelstan takes as a clue to the man’s concern. “Right, well, Brichester and the Elder Shield mostly want to know for coverage purposes. They’re not in the business of overriding your customs, they just…like to minimize any public fallout when, er, incidents happen. That’s what’s important to them.”

“I see,” Ragnar says. He steps back, pauses—possibly Lagertha’s signaling to him, he twitches a little in a way Athelstan’s coming to recognize—and then turns away. “This Gunnhild, how does she like her coffee?”

“What?” Athelstan says, hands halfway back into his bag.

“Just boil the water, I will deal with that,” Lagertha calls.

Shrugging, Ragnar tosses the rags into something and then walks off. Athelstan considers getting up, but when the next thing he hears is the water running, he decides there’s no need. They probably do need to butter up Gunnhild a bit, and if the other two can take care of that, he can concentrate on assembling what he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vyones is a made-up city in the made-up French province of Averoigne, and is the largest one in the province. It's also traditionally infested with black magic and necromancers and a fair number of young monks losing their innocence.


	5. Chapter 5

Gunnhild does not look pleased. “No one called him. Why would we? We were banishing the Young. It was not needed.”

Sometimes Athelstan wishes Ecbert were a little less…devoted to networking, not the least because the people who tend to be attracted to Cthulhic and other eldritch studies also tend to be those who dislike the feeling of being watched. And can back up that preference. “Well, it was a rather significant incursion, I’m sure the University couldn’t help but pick up the signal.”

“This is one of her birthing places. This is what happens here,” Gunnhild says dismissively. She finishes looping the portable electric pentacle over herself and steps out of the glowing tubes, then hands that over to him. Then starts to push past as he fumbles to turn it off, only to pause.

When he turns, he sees that Lagertha and Ragnar have come out of the cottage. Ragnar’s empty-handed and a little behind Lagertha, who has an oddly serene smile on her face as she advances. A little sound catches Athelstan’s ear and he turns back to see Gunnhild with an expression that is plainly shock.

Out of reflex, he clutches at his phone, but then Gunnhild breaks into an incredulous smile. “ _The_ Lagertha,” she says. “I cannot believe it, but I know your face.”

“That is very kind of you,” Lagertha says, though she’s just as plainly unsurprised at Gunnhild’s reaction. “It has been a while since Ragnar and I were here. I did not think they still talked of us.”

Gunnhild glances at Ragnar. She’s not quite as impressed with him, though she gives him a nod, and this seems hilarious enough to Ragnar that he sidles over a few feet, chuckling. He seems content to let Lagertha do all the talking. 

“Yes, they do still, especially those of us who are old enough to remember the memorials,” Gunnhild says. She’s reverting back to her usual reserved manner, though she gives Lagertha one more glance as if she’s expecting any moment to find a Mi-Go illusion at the bottom of this. “I thought when you spoke on the phone that you were a namesake, but you are her. So you have come back to your old territory.”

Something about Gunnhild’s tone makes Athelstan tense. Lagertha picks up on it as well and frowns. “Yes,” she says slowly. “Ragnar and I raised our family here.”

“It is a preserve now,” Gunnhild says. She’s no longer giving Lagertha those awed looks. “We at the Patrol look after it.”

“It’s been a preserve for decades—just how old _are_ you?” Athelstan can’t help but blurt out, as the implications of what they’re saying start to hit him.

Gunnhild doesn’t exactly move, but he can feel the crackle of magic around her and he—he yelps and steps back, since even though he _knew_ he was doing it, if not quite why, he’s not expecting the sheer amount of _push_ from the cottage wards. 

Probably it’s from waking up with two naked and highly attractive Norwegian werewolves draped over him, he thinks miserably, just before Gunnhild wheels on him, a dagger emblazoned with Elder Signs in hand. Athelstan has barely enough time to think _wait me?_ before he’s yanked backwards by the shoulder, thunder rolling overhead.

No, not thunder. Ragnar and Lagertha growling in unison as they both step between him and Gunnhild. Gunnhild’s eyes widen briefly but she keeps her stance and Athelstan realizes that one, he has no idea what is going on and two, nobody else is going to ask. So he…well, he flails. One of the few things he was good at before the whole Averoigne trip.

“Stop, stop, stop, _stop_ ,” he says. He jerks at the grip on his shoulder and, not expecting Ragnar to actually let go, just misses falling on his face when the man does. Manages to pick himself back up and slide between Ragnar and Gunnhild, who at least seems reluctant to shift from defensive to offensive. “Stop, all right, clearly, we’re missing some pieces here and I think we should just talk about them because I really can’t explain _more_ bodies to my University. So can we please just—just—explain?”

Wonder of wonders, the three of them actually stop to consider his suggestion. Then Gunnhild, dagger still firmly in hand, glances at the…

“Oh, sorry,” Athelstan says, waving his hands to make the cottage stop.

“Huh. You,” she says, and then puts her dagger away. “That part of the guest instructions makes sense now.”

Not in a pejorative way, she just says it with a little mild interest, but Athelstan can’t help flushing. He rubs his hands against his hips, then sees Lagertha giving him a look. He’s not sure what type of look, since it’s out of the corner of his eye, but then, he doesn’t really want to have his suspicions confirmed. Which was the entire reason for the sabbatical.

“Look, let’s just start…start with the important things,” he says. “Which I honestly don’t think need to involve fighting each other, so if we could just confirm that to start, I think that’d be a good place to…start. Yes.”

“We don’t want to take your patrol from you,” Ragnar suddenly breaks in. When Athelstan looks, he’s back to grinning at Gunnhild. “These Great Old Ones, they are very…smelly.”

Gunnhild purses her lips. “Yes.”

“I just don’t remember them,” Lagertha says. She’s still frowning at Gunnhild, but it comes off considerably less hostile. “I remember they talked about how in the old days, the pagan gods touched this place, but I do not remember cosmic aliens with tentacles and insanity.”

Gunnhild gives Athelstan a dubious look, to which he can only shrug because yes, that is oversimplifying, but as the one who has regularly taught first-years, he does know how to meaningfully condense a subject. “There was a pause. Just before the first world war, my great-grandmother and her shieldmaidens worked to seal the breaches so they could not be used. It held for a while but then they reopened and the Patrol re-established a team here.”

So they can’t be _that_ old, Athelstan thinks, and just then Lagertha turns and looks right at him as if she knew what he’s thinking. He looks away, only to have Ragnar laughing at him.

“What happened to you?” Gunnhild asks, ignoring the byplay. “They said that he had another wife.”

Ragnar stops laughing and looks very much as if he regrets grabbing Athelstan instead of leaping at her. Lagertha, on the other hand, has that calm smile on her face again. “That is true,” she says. “We sorted that out.”

“And that you still fought with him against a dark druid who tried to bend packs against their alphas, and you won,” Gunnhild goes on. 

“Is all this because of that damn—” Ragnar spits out a Norwegian word Athelstan doesn’t recognize, but that twists like a snake against the magic still humming in Athelstan’s bones.

Gunnhild snorts. “No, the breach came a year after. Because yes, they said you chased them out of the country…and they did not say you came back.”

“When was this?” Athelstan says. 

Mutters, really, and he’s not expecting anyone to pay him any mind, but then again, two of the people standing in front of him are werewolves and the third is an Elder shieldmaiden. “Twenty-two years ago,” Lagertha says matter-of-factly.

Which, if Athelstan’s mind had been keeping up, he could have worked out himself. He also should be able to keep himself from doing a double-take at her and Ragnar, but he can’t; Ragnar winks at him and Athelstan stammers before turning away.

Werewolves do tend to age well, but that’s still a little outside of normal range, even he knows that. And…he frowns. “But…you know modern technology.”

“We’ve been back for two years,” Ragnar says, rolling his shoulder. “They had the Internet before we left. Once we learned how to use it now, it wasn’t that hard.”

“If you do not want the land back, then why are you here?” Gunnhild says.

“Because of why we did not come back before,” Lagertha says. She is silent for a moment, studying Gunnhild. And then her eyes move to Athelstan, before going to Ragnar, who silently lifts his chin. “Those bastards who betrayed us to the—” she uses the same word as Ragnar “—who put us in _jars_.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Athelstan says. “Oh, of _course_.”

Ragnar turns sharply and stares at Athelstan, who blinks and then stares back. He’s not sure why the man—or Lagertha, who’s done the same thing—is looking at him as if he’s some sort of strange, unearthly thing. But when a moment later, they both relax and smile at him, without that hint of murder in it, he is reminded of how very, _very_ much he wished waking up to them naked hadn’t been a problem.

“Athelstan,” Gunnhild says pointedly.

“Oh, sorry,” he says, shutting the cottage wards down again.

Gunnhild sighs. “I meant what do you mean ‘of course.’”

“Well, if I were turned into essential salts by an enemy, I’d probably do anything to find them afterwards, too,” Athelstan says. “You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? It’s explicitly listed as one of the ways you can get banned from accessing the _Necronomicron_.”

“ _That_ is what we were?” Ragnar says, eyes reddening.

The cottage briefly glows orange. As Athelstan, resisting the impulse to curse and make things worse, wrestles it back under control, Gunnhild considers everything and then nods sharply. “Let us finish this over breakfast,” she says. “Then you will not need to worry about not sending us out of this dimension.”

“He is…” Lagertha starts, voice rising, and then she looks at Athelstan. She looks dismayed, unsurprisingly, and then controls herself. “Yes, let’s.”

* * *

As it turns out, Ragnar and Lagertha are something of legends in the Scandinavian werewolf community. They’ve even been praised by the eldritch magics community of which Gunnhild is a part, not for being part of it but because, despite what sounded like an extremely violent series of wars between packs, they had never tried to hijack non-Earth-based magics to try to get the upper hand. 

“It is so much more tiresome when you are dealing with someone who is supernatural,” Gunnhild sighs, with an exasperation that Athelstan is very familiar with himself. “At least with someone who knows nothing, you can start with that. With someone who is supernatural, you have to convince them this is not their supernatural, and they always think they will heal or run or fight better, because they are better than mere humans, and so they are fools.”

“I should introduce you to my son,” Lagertha says, nodding with approval behind her mug of coffee. “These are things he should hear more.”

However, the downside of that approach had been they’d been rather ill-equipped to deal with a rogue magic-worker initially imported by one of the alphas, and who after looking around had decided to simply take over everything. He’d converted the alphas one-by-one into essential salts, starting with his employer.

“Borg,” Ragnar says, nodding to the door. “He said his dead wife told him to hire someone from the UK.”

“I do not see why you would want to keep your enemies around in _any_ form,” Gunnhild says, looking puzzled. “Then there is always the chance to kill you.”

“Well, I believe the rationale is to keep them so you can question them until you’ve learned everything you want from them,” Athelstan says.

Gunnhild raises her brows. “If they are werewolves, can you not have that knowledge from their claws?”

“There’s probably the element of vindictiveness too,” Athelstan says, and then he rethinks. “I mean, I wasn’t meaning to imply that you’d done anything to—”

“Oh, we humiliated him,” Lagertha says. Not gloating, simply stating a fact. “He clearly did not want to forget that.”

“Then you killed him, when he brought you back,” Gunnhild says, and Lagertha presses her lips together.

The truth, as reluctantly revealed by her and Ragnar, is that once the magic-worker had converted them all into essential salts, he’d put them into jars and then put the jars into a storage locker at the nearest train station. Then he’d apparently left the country. The rest of Ragnar and Lagertha’s pack had survived, but they hadn’t been able to track down what had happened till only a couple years ago. Even then, they hadn’t really been able to figure out how to reverse the magic. One of them had taken the jars back to the wilderness area on the off-chance that it was the location and left them outside on the night of a huge storm, and that had just worked.

“That was the summer solstice that year,” Gunnhild says, consulting her phone. “The Mother herself attempted to make an appearance. We needed three full weeks to patch all the holes in reality.”

“Why do you call her the Mother?” Ragnar asks, and blinks when Gunnhild levels an unimpressed look at her. His hands flutter up a little. “I am only asking. I understand she is a giant alien who wishes her offspring to consume all living things in this world.”

“So she wishes them to do well, and so she is a mother. She is _the_ Mother,” Gunnhild says in a slow, flat tone. “We know what she is. This is not the same as worshipping her, if that is what you mean.”

Lagertha gives Ragnar a kick or something like that under the table. He half-winces, half-smiles, and flutters his fingers again; Gunnhild continues to seem unimpressed but she also doesn’t seem to be taking offense to anything.

Even so, Athelstan figures a change in topic might be wise. “Well, at any rate, it is only tracking down this mercenary that we need to do, isn’t it? All your other enemies should be gone. Aren’t they?”

Ragnar goes still. Then stretches back in his chair with slightly-exaggerated ease. “Horik and Borg are dead, this is true.”

Gunnhild ignores him and looks at Lagertha. “How many?”

“Well, I think that depends,” Lagertha says. She leans forward, resting her palms against the table. “What are you planning to do about them?”

“Kill them,” Gunnhild says.

Lagertha was patently not expecting that as an answer, and neither was Ragnar. They go still in a way that Athelstan recognizes from the de-escalation training that Brichester’s security team provides before the first full moon of every semester. Then Lagertha smiles, with her teeth showing. “Because now they know, about this way of turning people into powder?”

“Do you _want_ this to be common knowledge?” Gunnhild says.

“I can see why that would be a problem,” Ragnar says. “But then, that also means—”

Before Athelstan can help himself, he clears his throat. “I mean, we’ll probably do an assessment first. Not all of them hired this magic-worker, it sounds like, and so at least some of them might be amenable to just operating under confidentiality going forward—”

“Do they know what confidentiality means for eldritch studies?” Gunnhild says skeptically, glancing at him.

“Well, you can’t just kill _them_ ,” Athelstan says, his voice rising. “They didn’t ask to be turned into essential salts, and for you to do that after I kept the Young from eating them just doesn’t make any _sense_ —”

For a long, achingly awkward moment, everyone is still and silent. Then the house settles back into its proper three dimensions, and Gunnhild exhales and pulls out her phone. She taps at it, then puts it on the table so that they can all see the screen.

“We are currently searching the preserve for any other people or similar beings,” she says in a brisk tone. “You have all been exposed to Shub-Niggurath, and if that has happened on top of the magics that would have been used to make you an essential salt, you are much more likely to call up another Great Old One. If you do, whether you know how to make an essential salt or not is pointless.”

“So you kill us and this gets rid of the danger,” Ragnar says.

“No, so we find you and we cleanse you and then we explain to you that if you call up a Great Old One, we will kill you,” Gunnhild says. She pauses. “We will also know how to identify you, so if you attempt to research other eldritch magic without permission, we will kill you. There are only so many places in the world this can be done, and we know of each other.”

“This seems fair,” Ragnar says, and then grins with Gunnhild seems nonplussed. “And what if we want to kill each other?”

Gunnhild shrugs. “You do not have to be alive to be cleansed, so as long as we have the body for that, I have no preference.”

“We can agree to that,” Lagertha says.

“Good,” Gunnhild says. She looks at Athelstan. When he doesn’t say anything, she points to her phone. “Now can we talk about how many and where they could be?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Essential salts" are from Lovecraft's _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ and basically it's a spell to turn people into a powder, which then can be used to bring them back whenever the evil sorcerer wants. Said sorcerer in the story took to robbing the graves of people famous for their brains, apparently so he could torture knowledge out of them.


	6. Chapter 6

As it turns out, Ragnar and Lagertha have no less than three other werewolves still possibly after them. They do think that that’s the extent of the jarred people, but they don’t have a very good idea of who the magic-worker who turned them into essential salts in the first place was. The person caught them completely by surprise and neither of them got a good look at them, nor did their pack.

“But Borg’s claws. I forgot with the cleaning,” Ragnar says after a second. He holds his hand up and goes outside, leaving Lagertha and Gunnhild to discuss—in a surprisingly amiable manner—the best ways to track and trap the remaining werewolves. Then he returns a few minutes later, his fingers covered in clotted blood, a slightly pained look on his face. “He hired him over the phone.”

“What was the number?” Athelstan asks.

Ragnar rattles it off, along with the comment that it was probably a burner. “The only other things Borg remembered was that he sounded like an English aristocrat, he disliked his daughter and the family she married into, and he kept calling us pagans.”

“When he obviously practices eldritch magic?” Gunnhild says, looking up from her phone. 

“I’ll start looking into who he might be,” Athelstan says, taking the opportunity to grab his laptop and move into the bedroom.

He doesn’t begrudge Gunnhild and Lagertha their conversation; they do have to find these people, after all. But Athelstan’s not going to be any help there, and sitting around with nothing to do just makes him more aware of how the house’s wards keep twitching in time with him. Gunnhild can obviously handle either werewolf, if there’s anything that needs to be handled—and also, to be honest, she’s been doing such a good job of pretending she doesn’t notice what Athelstan is doing that it’s just making the wards worse.

So he needs something to occupy his mind, at least till he can find a private moment to substantively deal with things, and someone might as well start tracking down this mercenary. Which is something he can do.

“Where are you going?” Ragnar waits till Athelstan’s pulled himself up from where he’d startled and nearly toppled off the bed, then comes into the room.

Athelstan fidgets with his laptop. “I was going to start checking Brichester’s records for potential candidates for the man who turned you into essential salts, is all. I, um, the wifi’s better in here and you need a good data connection for the University login to work.”

The light briefly goes purple, stopping Ragnar from asking whatever he’d been about to ask. Grimacing, Athelstan hunches over his laptop and navigates to the Security portal. Then he hears a noise and looks up and Ragnar’s still standing there, squinting at him.

“You think you can find him?” Ragnar asks. “We don’t know much.”

“There aren’t _that_ many people who have that sort of knowledge,” Athelstan mutters, reapplying himself to the keyboard. He pulls up the standard form for reporting dangerous practice of eldritch studies and starts filling it out. “Actually, there’s a thought, it has been…twenty years, you said? The number of people who’d still be operating with full sanity would be even smaller.”

Ragnar makes a low, amused noise. He sounds closer, and when Athelstan looks up…he’s farther away, over by Athelstan’s bags. He prods one with his foot, then sniffs. “What happened in Vyones?”

“None of your business,” Athelstan snaps.

Then he thinks the better of it, given how Ragnar is a _werewolf_ and Athelstan’s not only away from Gunnhild but also from his phone and all of his tools for practicing magic. But Ragnar doesn’t seem to mind. True, he flicks Athelstan a glance, but it’s quick and almost bored, and then he’s right back to being interested in something in the bags. “What is this…” Ragnar waves his hand at the walls “…that you do?”

“What?” Athelstan says, trying to _not_ pay attention to him. “Looking up the magic-worker who turned you into—”

“Salt, yes, you said,” Ragnar says dismissively, as he squats down to tug down the already half-open zipper of one bag. “It was more like sand.”

Athelstan blinks. Of all the things he’s experienced, actually seeing essential salts isn’t one of them. Not that he would care to, but…it’s something he doesn’t know. “Sand? Really?”

“Really,” Ragnar says, and then he pulls out a leather collar. “What is all this for if you don’t have sex?”

“Why do you want to know?” Athelstan says, back to snapping, and then he loses control of his magic again and the angles of the cottage ceiling bend disturbingly inwards.

A second later, he’s slapped his laptop shut and is concentrating on his breathing. This tamps things down, but only for a moment because then he hears Gunnhild’s exclamation in the next room, shortly followed by an altercation between her and Lagertha. He can’t make out exactly what they’re saying, but Gunnhild’s just come from a night of banishing a half-grown Young and he doubts she’s going to be patient. “I’m fine!” he calls.

And then curses, sucking his breath, as the cottage flexes again. He bites his lip and _wills_ the perspective back to human three dimensions, and then waits for it to fall apart. And…when it doesn’t, he breathes out. Slowly.

“That,” Ragnar says. When Athelstan looks incredulously at him, the man blinks guilelessly and moves his hand around his head. “What is that?”

“I do magic,” Athelstan says curtly, and then decides that isn’t fair, especially when Ragnar is being quite calm about all of this. Almost alarmingly so, in fact, but…first Athelstan needs to rebalance himself. “I don’t just study it—I started studying it because first I started _doing_ it and this is the kind of thing that you really should know the proper way to handle it, or else you—”

Ragnar hums thoughtfully, then casually flops onto the far end of the bed. “Lose your mind to a cosmic alien?”

“Well, that’s one of the things that can happen,” Athelstan sighs.

“One?” Ragnar says, inflecting the word oddly. Then he brings his legs up and crosses them, his feet almost on Athelstan’s lap. He has tattoos on his ankles—Athelstan drags his eyes up to find Ragnar grinning at him. “I want to have sex with you. So I want to know why you don’t have sex.”

“It’s not that—it’s not that you aren’t—attractive,” Athelstan stammers.

Now Ragnar starts to look a little impatient. “I know that. I know you think that. But you don’t have sex.”

“I _do_ , I just—” And then Athelstan catches himself.

Ragnar quirks an eyebrow. And then starts a little as Lagertha appears in the doorway. They have a silent conversation, but enough of it’s conveyed through body language Athelstan can watch to determine that she disagrees with what he’s doing. “We need to finish these vendettas,” she says.

“We are,” Ragnar says. He waves his hand towards Athelstan. “He thinks he can find this magic-worker.”

Lagertha swivels to look intently at Athelstan, whose face already feels as if it’s pulled all the blood in him towards it. “Can you?”

“I—process of elimination, small candidate pool, reasonably high probability,” Athelstan mumbles. He takes the opportunity to reopen his laptop, whereupon he realizes that the form didn’t save and he’s got to start over.

Sighing, he does that, and this time he makes sure it submits. Then he goes to the section where they keep a list of people banned from the Cthulhic lending-library network. He doesn’t think he’ll find anything on it, given he checked it before coming to Norway and doesn’t remember anything like what Ragnar described, but it’s something to do. Something that doesn’t involve discussing his sex life, or the…accessories it ends up involving, or…he jerks his head up as the bed dips.

“Go with her,” Lagertha orders. She’s looking at Athelstan but it’s clearly meant for Ragnar, who’s already sighing and wandering out of the room. “Erlendur should be enough to keep you busy for a few hours.”

Ragnar mutters something in Norwegian, but proceeds out to have a short conversation with Gunnhild. Then Gunnhild pokes her head in the room. She looks…less than approving of the situation, but all she does is toss Athelstan his phone.

“The rest of the patrol has found two of them,” she says. “I am going to meet them. Ragnar will come to verify their identity. You can stay, but mind the house.”

“All right,” Athelstan says, because while he’d rather not be alone, he also can’t tell her how to do her job. But then something occurs to him and he starts to ask her, only to catch himself as something _else_ occurs to him. She cocks her head and so does Lagertha, and Athelstan swallows hard and just…“This _is_ just for cleansing, yes?”

Something flickers across Gunnhild’s impassive face, too quickly to read. “That depends on them and him, of course.”

In the other room, Ragnar lets out a short bark of laughter, and then, as Gunnhild withdraws, he starts singing to himself in Norwegian. He’s clearly not worried, and neither is Lagertha as she turns back to him, a slightly too pleased smile on her face.

“I do not think she will kill him,” she says, settling herself more comfortably. She pauses as the front door creaks, then leans against the bedpost. “Ragnar and I, we do not expect others to fight our battles for us, and I do not think she is interested in any battle except the one against this Shub-Niggurath of the Many Kids.”

“‘Thousand Young,’” Athelstan corrects before he can help himself. Then flushes and ducks his head and continues scrolling through the banned list. “Well, that’s true, the Elder Patrol is supposed to be neutral…but if they do think you’re going to raise the chances of a breach, they’re utterly ruthless.”

“Do _you_ think we will?” Lagertha asks.

Something about the way she says that makes Athelstan want to look up and to burrow into his laptop at the same time. “I, er…no? That is—”

“I don’t think we would enjoy multi-dimensional aliens tearing out our brains,” Lagertha goes on, in the same amused, slightly slowed voice. It’s as if she’s savoring each word like a tender piece of meat. “We do want this person who did this dead. And we do find this all very new, and different to learn about. But then, I think you want the same.”

“Well, dead…I suppose that’s usually how it ends, if they’re that far along,” Athelstan acknowledges. His back cramps a bit and he moves to alleviate it, and ends up looking Lagertha in the eye. “I do study similar things, but not for…for…using against people. Not on purpose.”

Lagertha’s lips quirk. They’re very full and pink. “That is fine. Some people are scholars.”

“Right,” Athelstan mutters, looking down again. He hasn’t really been reading this list.

The wards on the house are humming again, he realizes. He grimaces and moves his hands to the sides of the laptop to lift it off, then remembers he can’t…exactly excuse himself like he needs to. Or maybe, he thinks with a tinge of despair, he should just give up on the idea of dignity and tell Lagertha he needs the room. He’s never going to be able to mask it from her senses anyway, and better a little humiliation than—

“Ragnar doesn’t want to waste time,” Lagertha says suddenly. She’s still looking at him, but with less of that flirty interest. Still interested, just…warier? No, it doesn’t have that edge to it either. “We were asleep for so long and it bothers him, the time missed.”

She pauses to watch him. He hopes he looks sympathetic—he _is_ sympathetic, but because of that, he knows there’s not really much adequate to say to something like that.

“You are very interesting,” she adds, tilting her head. “You don’t like the idea that we should be killed?”

“Well, not for something that was done to you, that you couldn’t help,” Athelstan says. He presses his lips together, then moves his laptop to the side. “You seem very sane, for all that—if it’s been two years, that’s more than long enough to tell if someone just can’t adjust back, and you seem to have done that successfully.”

Lagertha’s lips twist. “Yes,” she says. Then she gives him a little shake of the head. “And no. Catching up on technology, news…but my children have grandchildren now. I am glad they did not die when we were…away, but it is…it is strange. When we are done killing the people we should have killed in the first place, so this wouldn’t have happened, I am not sure what there is to do.”

“You have a pack. And this—you really don’t want your territory back?” Athelstan says, blinking. Those are the two most important things to werewolf identity, based on the small amount he’s learned about their culture. “You weren’t just saying that to calm Gunnhild down?”

“Land where giant tentacles always come from the sky?” Lagertha asks, brows rising.

“…yes, that is a bit of a problem,” Athelstan says.

Lamely. She smiles at him, and then she picks herself up and puts herself down about half a meter closer to him, close enough that he can feel the warmth coming off her hand where it’s next to his foot. He just stops himself from sucking in his breath, then cringes as the walls shiver.

“Why do we make you nervous?” Lagertha asks.

Athelstan opens his mouth, then closes it. Then suddenly is irritated as the cottage wards continue to—he reaches out and yanks at them, because honestly, this is a building rated for a Grade Six incursion and yet it’s still wobbling like a molded jelly. Of course that doesn’t do any good and he ends up cursing and frantically tumbling off the bed to root out the back-up grounding stones under it. 

He gets two of them set and then catches his breath as things straighten out again. “Sorry about that,” he mutters.

Lagertha doesn’t answer. He braces himself and looks over at her, but she just looks thoughtful. “Are you afraid?”

The way she says it, she’s not…contemptuous or insulting. She’s just very puzzled, as far as he can tell. Which is _very_ strange, and different, and perhaps that’s why he’s honest with her.

“Yes,” he says. Then winces. “Not of you—well, a little of you, you’re werewolves—”

Lagertha’s expression twitches but she holds back whatever she’d been thinking of saying.

“—but it happened before you. Before I even came here,” Athelstan says. He fiddles with the grounding stone, then remembers what a terrible idea that is and gets up. Goes back to the bed and retrieves his laptop. “I…look, it’s not that I don’t have sex, but when I do, things happen, and I have to do it in a certain way to not accidentally create bridges to the Dreamlands and things like that and that’s why I’m on sabbatical in the first place, to get that under control.”

“What are the Dreamlands?” Lagertha asks.

“Well, what they sound like, the lands you go when you dream, because some of them are actually separate dimensions and some are all right but some have Azathoth—” he sees the questions in her face “—it’s a Great Old One but without tentacles and with immediate insanity upon first contact. But anyway, it’s complicated enough with just me so I’m not looking to force that onto other people right now.”

And then Athelstan takes a breath. He hasn’t really had this talk with…anyone, actually. Ecbert doesn’t count since that was about what’d be necessary to continue studying at Brichester, not about entering into any sort of non-professional relationship, and the people in Averoigne don’t either, since they all were used to this sort of thing and just looked at it as tutorials. So this is the first time and this is…depressing, he thinks.

“I see,” Lagertha says neutrally.

She and he look at each other for a while. She doesn’t seem to want to move, and he’s…got his laptop, so he starts to move towards the other room, only for her to raise a hand. 

“The magic-worker?” she says. Then looks surprised at his confusion. “I thought you were trying to find him?”

“Oh…oh, yes,” he says, and for lack of anything better, he sits down on the bed again. 

He opens up his laptop and it turns out he has a ping back from Security, asking him for further details. That is promising, actually, and he gladly explains why to Lagertha as she twists around to look at his screen. She’s too close and he should probably move away, but…she’s not avoiding him. She does seem to just want to talk about the magic-worker, and how likely it is that he can track them down with the few pieces of information they have, but all in all, that’s probably the best scenario. At least she’s not running out after Gunnhild and Ragnar.

And he really can’t avoid people, he thinks. That wasn’t the point of the sabbatical—the point was to get him _back_ to society. So he sucks up a deep breath, sucks down the shaky magic every time his attention drifts to the slopes of Lagertha’s shoulders and breasts, and…tries to be a decent person.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize that in traditional Cthulhu Mythos, the various institutions possessing good libraries of evil-magic books are constitutionally incapable of keeping out the people who really shouldn't read those, but Lovecraft never bothered himself much with considering how a university could do that and still make enough money to replace the professors who periodically go insane and/or disappear. Also if someone like Ecbert is running one, he's going to efficiently eliminate any threats to his domain.


	7. Chapter 7

Ragnar and Gunnhild return shortly before lunch, accompanied by two others from the Elder Patrol. It’s a little awkward up till the Elder Patrol set about boxing up Borg’s remains for the local ghoul-run composting center, at which point Ragnar and Lagertha stop baring their teeth so much and just sit down to eat.

“Erlendur?” Lagertha asks, unfolding a napkin.

“Eh, they cleansed him. They have one of those—” hand-wave at Athelstan’s electric pentacle “—but bigger, and you step into it while they chant and spray you with herb water,” Ragnar says with a one-sided shrug. He pops the cap off his fizzy lemonade with a claw. “Then he stepped on a bear-trap with his head. He’s dead.”

Lagertha looks at him. Ragnar grins and hands her a plate.

“Athelstan,” Gunnhild says from the doorway. When they all look up, she motions outside with one hand.

He goes with her, of course, and they walk around the corner to where a Patrol truck is parked with the back gate down. The truck bed contains several small boxes, which turn out to hold broken jars and smashed stones with runes carved into them and other evidence left by the magic-worker. They’re still vividly imprinted with magical traces, much to Athelstan’s surprise.

“They didn’t clean up much after themselves,” he comments, while scanning them and taking notes with his phone. “I think there might actually be enough for a signature that the Brichester security team can…is that really necessary?”

Gunnhild glances at the crossbow she’s holding, and then at the cottage door. “Are you going to sleep with them?”

“Wh—why on earth would you ask that?” Athelstan sputters.

“The cottage is not designed for Yog-Sothoth,” Gunnhild says, frowning a little, as if he’s the one who is being dense. “It has shielding to protect from Cthulhic breaches and aftershocks, but mainly from the outside. And also we designed it for Shub-Niggurath. Yog-Sothoth does not come often enough for us to think of it with our guest houses.”

Athelstan opens and closes his mouth. He looks down at his phone, then at her.

“We could relocate you to one of our barracks, which would have better shielding, but it is not close. Having sex with someone would be faster,” Gunnhild says. She looks at him, then raises an eyebrow. “They seem interested. Have you not spoken?”

“I can’t just— _ask_ them for something like that. That’s a very significant commitment!” Athelstan hisses.

Gunnhild frowns. “I do not recall that those types of rituals require marriage. Is that what you are referring to?”

“I—look, I have other alternatives,” Athelstan finally manages. His phone beeps and he nearly throws it into the truck bed before controlling himself. “Which I can and will resort to. Just as soon as I can—I just need some time on my own. And—oh, for that matter, I could probably channel the leftovers into a triangulation spell, if you want to just leave me some of these jars.”

“You will need to do it outside, the cottage is too compromised right now,” Gunnhild says after a moment. She reaches into one of the boxes and hands Athelstan a clear plastic container filled with glass fragments. After he’s taken it, she unloads her crossbow and then hands it to him as well. “Also we are still working on the third werewolf. Your application said you know how to use this…”

“Yes, yes, I do,” Athelstan sighs. And then for good measure, since she’s looking dubiously at him, he unlocks the crossbow arms and folds them in before tucking it under his arm. “I have American relatives who’ve taken me hunting. I promise I won’t break it.”

“If it will keep you from calling up Yog-Sothoth in your defense, you should break it. We have more,” Gunnhild informs him. She shuts up the back of the trunk and then answers a question one of the other Elder Patrol members calls to her. Then looks at him again. “We will be taking away the body for proper disposal. It should take three hours. I do not know where this third werewolf is, but they are not close to here, so I think you should not be interrupted before I come back. Then we will cleanse them.”

Athelstan, his mind already on magical ritual set-up, almost doesn’t catch that last part. “Wait,” he says, raising his hand as she starts to turn. “I thought you—”

“Cleansed them already?” Gunnhild says. “When?”

Well, true, Lagertha hadn’t left, but Ragnar had mentioned the pentacle coming out. “But you can’t just do Lagertha before you go?” 

“They have been around you for almost twenty-four hours, and your magic is warping everything,” Gunnhild points out. “We would need to adapt the ritual. I have not had the time.”

“Oh, right,” Athelstan sighs, because of course a standard cleanse wouldn’t work under those circumstances. Then he jerks his head up. “But wait, then how am I supposed to—”

“Have them wait inside. The cottage should be fine for that,” Gunnhild says, and walks off, as if it’s really that simple.

There has to be some reason why she can take Ragnar and Lagertha with her, Athelstan thinks as panic starts to bring the cold sweats on. _Something_.

* * *

There is no reason why Gunnhild or the rest of the Elder Patrol can take Ragnar and Lagertha with them. They aren’t cleansed, which means they need to stay inside the incursion radius for their sake and the sake of everyone else who enjoys this reality with the dimensions it already has, and the only other alternative is for them to be dead, since there are certain cleansing shortcuts that can be used in that case. Except Athelstan would prefer them to not be dead, and they certainly haven’t done anything to really deserve it, and the Elder Patrol is pragmatic but _not_ blindly fanatical about its duties, which is why Athelstan ultimately opted for Norway over Brichester’s sister university in the Dreamlands. So Ragnar and Lagertha are staying put for the time being, and Athelstan needs to explain to them why.

“I could accidentally mutate you or drive you insane or send you to Yuggoth,” Athelstan says, and then catches Ragnar perking up. “Yuggoth is not somewhere you want to visit, trust me.”

“But this spell sounds very interesting,” Ragnar says.

“Is there anything you _don’t_ find interesting?” Athelstan snaps, his temper unexpectedly running out.

Ragnar’s eyes narrow, and if Athelstan’s not mistaken, that is alpha red bleeding into their pupils. But then Ragnar presses his lips together and takes a half-step back, running right into a startled Lagertha. The two of them exchange a glance and Athelstan gets the distinct impression that Ragnar is pleased to have surprised her, and even more pleased that she’s begrudging about it.

“Is there anything you need for this?” Lagertha asks. “Water? Something to eat? You skipped lunch.”

“Oh, did I?” Athelstan says, blinking.

Why, yes, he did, says his suddenly loud stomach, and as he gropes it in hopes of silencing it, Lagertha snorts and turns back into the cottage. She picks up a fresh log and tosses it into the stove, then starts to open and shut cupboards.

Ragnar just stands there, watching Athelstan. Which is unnerving, but…not in Athelstan’s way, so he finishes retrieving the last of his tools from the bedroom. When he comes out, Ragnar’s still in the exact same place with the exact same expression on his face. Athelstan pauses, retreats to the doorway, and then pauses again.

“This place has a Netflix subscription—at least, it’s supposed to, I haven’t actually gotten a chance to try it yet,” he says, as Ragnar’s face gets slightly less stony but no more readable. “If you put on a movie, that should be just about how long it’ll take me. And then the cottage walls will stop…doing that.”

Lagertha, head bent over the sink, says she’ll bring lunch out in ten minutes. Which honestly won’t delay things that much, and it’s very nice of her, and he probably should eat something so he doesn’t accidentally slide into the wrong version of Aklo. So he says all right and goes outside and starts to set things up.

Five minutes later, Ragnar’s squatting just beyond the circle Athelstan is trying to cut into the grass. “This is just getting ready,” he comments. “You haven’t started.”

“No, I haven’t,” Athelstan grunts, too busy wrestling with his Valusian-steel dagger to be irritated with him.

Well, almost too busy. The next thing Ragnar does is reach out for the dagger and Athelstan can’t help a hiss at him. Ragnar promptly stops, though Athelstan suspects that’s more out of amusement than anything else.

“I have to do this—if I don’t do it properly, you could die,” Athelstan snaps.

Ragnar nods attentively. He withdraws the hand, but still stays leaning over the ragged trench. “There is a circle already on the other side of the cottage.”

“That’s set up for a runic-based system and this is a completely different—” Athelstan exhales. Fine, he thinks. Fine, he’s a teacher, he’s taught all sorts of students, and at the end of the day, it’s just a set of rules like any magical system would have. He can abstract it to the point that his dignity shouldn’t even be an issue. “If I just show you what I’m going to do, will you stop bothering me?”

“Am I bothering you?” Ragnar asks, in what appears to be complete seriousness.

Athelstan stares at him. For a moment, Ragnar stares back, and then, strangely, the man…folds a little. Shoulders down, eyes flicking away, sheepish air thoroughly in place. He abruptly shifts himself from a squat to a cross-legged sit, then runs one hand up along his neck and back over the top of his head.

“Twenty years in a jar and people still smell the same,” Ragnar says suddenly. He flips and flutters his raised hand in the air, then drops it to one knee. “They smell like what they are going to do. We all ended up in those, but when we came out, I knew the others were not going to keep their promise and go after the—” he uses the same word Lagertha did “—but would come after us first. You could smell it on them. I asked my wife the other day, _were_ we really gone for so long?”

“Well, but your pack,” Athelstan starts, and then bites his lip, thinking that that’s rude.

Ragnar doesn’t seem to mind, and just gives him an acknowledging nod. “Yes, they survived. They remembered their father and their mothers. But…I think they wouldn’t mind, most of them, if we did not come back. It was awkward. Bjorn is alpha, and so is Rollo—that is very many alphas, even for the Lothbroks.”

“Is that why they didn’t come with you?” Athelstan asks. Then grimaces. “Sorry, I don’t know that much about werewolves—”

“That is why,” Ragnar says, grinning now, his lower jaw a little dropped so nearly all of his teeth can show. “Also the land around Hedeby does not have an Elder Patrol, or cosmic aliens. It’s better, something a pack should hold onto. What is here is old business that should have been finished years ago. So the ones who should have done it, we do it.”

“You weren’t—were you expecting to die?” Athelstan says sharply. “Did you come here—”

“Does that bother you?” Ragnar says. He pauses, looking Athelstan over, and then lets his grin lose some of its teeth. He cocks his head. “It’s a vendetta. You can always die. But anyway, it had to be done before anything new could come.”

“Oh. I see.” He doesn’t really, but…on the other hand, he can see, a little. The logic doesn’t necessarily make sense when he thinks it through, but something about what Ragnar says resonates with him. “Well, I understand about having to do things because you’re being responsible.”

Ragnar nods, and hums, and picks at the grass. “Is that what the sex is about?” he says, looking up. He’s amused at Athelstan’s sputtering, of course, but unlike before, he still seems focused. He’s aiming for something, not just trying to unnerve Athelstan. “The things you have. They’re not new. And they don’t smell like you. That is—they smell of someone, but not _you_.”

“If you can smell it, does that make you think you have a right to know all about it?” Athelstan snaps.

“Eh, no, but I was in a jar and now it’s twenty years later. I think, I can ask, if I want to know, and what is the worst that could happen?” Ragnar says, the corners of his mouth curling up.

“Well, a lot more than getting stuck in a jar. You could—” 

Athelstan stops himself. Ragnar’s perfectly still, eyes fixed on him, and the man’s curiosity is almost a palpable force in the air between them. And…it’s not malicious, Athelstan realizes after a few seconds. Not innocent either, but somehow, there’s a complete absence of the kind of disgusted, contemptuous interest all over everyone at Brichester that had driven him to ask for an out-of-country sabbatical. 

He’s not really certain how he feels about that. For a moment he sits, and then he picks up his dagger again. He stabs it into the ground, then pulls at it and it comes a little towards him before getting stuck in a root or something like that. So he pulls it up and shakes it clean, and then does it again.

He does that a few times before Ragnar, grimacing, clears his throat and holds out his hand. Athelstan starts to protest and Ragnar just takes the dagger from him. “You want a circle? This big?”

“Yes,” Athelstan says after a moment.

Ragnar unfolds his legs and stretches his hips a little, then bends back down and slashes out a perfect circle in a few seconds. “Anything—”

“I’m supposed to do most of it myself. The outer circle’s fine, but the rest is—this is all supposed to be tied into me, so when I, ah, when the climax hits, it’ll redirect everything into the earth,” Athelstan says. Flushing, because he always flushes, and suddenly he’s frustrated with _himself_. He’s going to have to live with this for the rest of his life, he’s damn well going to have to learn how to talk about it. “It’s sex magic. That’s why I have those—you can do it with a partner, but it’s tricky. It’s a lot safer if I just do it myself, but then it just takes longer because you have to—I have to, ah, do it more.”

“Why is it safer?” Ragnar says. He plops back down on the ground, idly flipping the dagger with one hand. “If they know how to do it, they know.”

“Well, it’s _sex_. It’s not really when you usually expect people to have any self-control whatsoever, let alone enough to time things with your chants,” Athelstan says, startled enough to just answer the man.

Ragnar makes an ‘ah’ shape with his mouth. “That’s why you have those toys.”

“Yes,” Athelstan says, and then winces. “I mean, no. I mean—I _was_ doing that, a little, but that was Averoigne and over there they don’t think sex magic is inherently taboo.”

“Who thinks that?” Ragnar says, blinking. “What, people here?”

“I just got here a few days ago, I haven’t really asked,” Athelstan says, a little tartly. He ends up focusing on the spinning dagger for a distraction. “I meant…more where I’m actually from. My home university, Brichester.”

“They think sex magic is evil?” Ragnar says. “But…this is also where they study the cosmic aliens who drop children with tentacles from the sky.”

“Well, Brichester’s very English,” Athelstan admits. “Anyway, generally, most Cthulhic scholars tend to not think very highly of your bodily appetites. Averoigne’s always been seen as a bit perverted that way.”

Ragnar snorts. “I think anywhere who thinks sex is good is where I would go.”

“They don’t think sex magic is _good_ , they just don’t think it’s off-limits,” Athelstan says, and something about his tone must be off because Ragnar looks sharply at him. He grimaces and looks away from the other man. “Look, can you stop—with that—”

“Here,” Ragnar says, promptly ceasing with the dagger-flipping. He turns it handle-first towards Athelstan. “Too expensive?”

“It’s more like if you do that while saying the wrong thing, you could end up going back in time,” Athelstan sighs, and quickly takes the dagger while Ragnar’s giving it a second, more interested look. “Unplanned skips are usually not good, they almost always take you to some medieval sorcerer who plans to sacrifice you to some Great Old One.”

Surprisingly, Ragnar doesn’t have any comment to that. He just sits back and watches Athelstan carve more lines—thankfully, not curved and therefore something he can do himself—into the ground. 

A few minutes later, Lagertha comes out with a glass of water and a plate containing a sandwich. She hands it to Ragnar, then sits down next to him. They don’t actually have a verbal conversation, so far as Athelstan can tell, but something is communicated, because Ragnar steps into the circle with Athelstan and pushes the glass and plate at him.

“We were in Paris, before the jars,” Lagertha says. Her eyes drift over the circle, and then she reaches out and picks away some cut grass from the edge. “It was…nice. I like France.”

Ragnar looks sharply at her, then turns back to Athelstan, who puts the dagger down and takes the glass and plate. He needs a second to figure out how he’s going to start the next bit anyway, since it has to be done in one stroke, and so he uses it to drink a little and take one bite of the sandwich. “Were you there to ki—” he starts to ask, and then gulps some water to cover it.

“Yes, we did that,” Lagertha says, smiling. She sits back and watches as Athelstan rather self-consciously puts the plate and glass to the side and picks up the dagger again. “Averoigne isn’t near there.”

“No. No, it’s not, they’re actually quite proud of how different they are from the rest of the country,” Athelstan rattles. He puts the dagger tip to the ground, then lifts it again as he thinks he sees a knot under some grass that might skew it. Then he puts it down again. “It’s sort of like here, where there’s been a lot of historical exposure to the Great Old Ones.”

“So you were there to study?” Lagertha asks.

“Your hand is shaking,” Ragnar points out, and when Athelstan can’t help a defensive look, he nudges at the plate with his foot. “You should finish eating.”

Athelstan opens his mouth, shuts it, and decides that perhaps starting the pattern on the other side of the circle might be a better idea. The circle won’t actually have ‘sides’ until he puts in this part anyway, so he has still has some choices. “I was there to—study, yes, sort of.”

“Sort of,” Lagertha says, and even though he’s not looking at her, he can hear the lifted brows in her voice.

He turns around, since that also conveniently means he needs to face away from her, and surveys the ground. But then Ragnar comes around to that side, again with the glass and plate; when Athelstan presses his lips together, Ragnar grins like he has no idea why he’d be annoying and then puts the food and water down on the ground, right where Athelstan had been thinking of starting. “I wasn’t originally at Brichester, I started out as a seminary student and I was studying some old Christian sects—like Cathars, except they actually _were_ in contact with unseen powers. Still are, actually, that was the whole problem with Averoigne and why now I’m—rambling,” Athelstan says. “Rambling.”

“It’s interesting,” Ragnar says. “I like the rambling.”

“Is _everything_ interesting to you?” Athelstan says.

It comes out sharper than he’d like. Ragnar’s eyes widen a little, and then, without breaking eye contact with Athelstan, he drops into a crouch next to the plate. “No. But you are.”

“Because…I can’t be your only option for sex after what happened to you,” Athelstan says, his exasperation continuing to drive his verbal choices.

Ragnar snorts and shakes his head, and then gives Lagertha a look that’s half-affectionate, half-teasing. She bridles a little, then dismissively turns from him, instead getting up. She stretches out and retrieves the glass, and then shifts her knees over the circle so she’s inside it with them.

“We like you,” she says. She tilts her head. “You seem to know things we do not, and that we want to know, and when we ask, you’re willing to explain. Also, you don’t want to kill us or fight with us.”

“That seems like a ridiculously low bar, and you really don’t know anything about me besides that,” Athelstan says.

“We _could_ know more,” Ragnar says, with almost childish eagerness. Lagertha elbows him and he huffs a little, then slightly tamps it down. Slightly. “We could have sex too, but that does not _have_ to come first. It just…was an idea.”

“But that’s the whole problem, with me sex involves a lot more than just—” Athelstan exhales. Then puts his hands to his face and just avoids stabbing out an eye because Ragnar lets out an alarmed noise. He grimaces and looks at the dagger, and then sighs. “Look, it’s a very long story but it turns out that I am surprisingly good at certain types of magic, and that means I have to be very careful or else I tend to rip through realities. So I can’t just have sex with someone. Usually I have to tie them up and—there are rituals and—and I actually _don’t_ want to kill you, or drive you insane, or—”

“How tied up?” Ragnar asks.

“Well, it depends on whether I’m just trying to have sex or if I’m trying to actually do something, like right now I was going to redo the protections on the cottage that I’ve been wrecking, and.” Athelstan catches himself. Then shakes his head. “No, you don’t understand, it’s not just—it’s _real_. You won’t be able to get away, that’s the entire point, I have to do it myself.”

For some reason, Ragnar and Lagertha don’t seem appalled. Or surprised. If anything, they seem to be even more focused on Athelstan. “You said timing was important and there are toys for that in your bags,” Lagertha says, and then almost rolls her eyes when Ragnar mutters he already asked that. “Those are not for you, then?”

“Are you—are you _trying_ to figure out how to do this?” Athelstan asks incredulously.

“Why not?” Ragnar says. He pauses, the corners of his mouth twitching, but instead of breaking into one of those grins, he holds up his hand. “Athelstan. We are werewolves, and we are—”

“Yes, I know you heal quickly, but anything to do with Cthulhic magic is entirely different and it could be permanent—I mean, we have an entire scale dedicated to whether the potential impact is limited to just one lifetime or to multiple reincarnations—”

“Athelstan,” Ragnar says, and then repeats it calmly until Athelstan’s sputtering slows. “We are werewolves, and we are old enough to know when we are risking our lives. This is why we did not ask the rest of our pack to come with us—because this is only about us, and is not for them.”

“You don’t want to hurt us, and you mean that,” Lagertha adds. “I think that matters. No, I don’t know everything you do, but I can see this, and I think that is enough to make a decision for myself.”

Athelstan has an irrational impulse to throw the dagger at them and run into the woods. He doesn’t do that, but he does plop down to the ground as he struggles for something they’ll listen to. “You’re _alphas_.”

They look at him. And look at him. Finally Lagertha’s brow arches. “Yes…?”

“I—I would have to tie you up and keep you from—and you’re _alphas_ ,” Athelstan says helplessly.

Lagertha finally begins to look a little annoyed. “I do not see how this matters, if your intent is not to misuse us. How I have sex has nothing to do with what I am.”

“What _do_ you know about werewolves?” Ragnar says, eyes narrowing.

“…not much,” Athelstan says after a long sigh. “Brichester takes them as students, of course, but they tend to stay with each other, and anyway, my field of study isn’t usually of interest to them.”

“Tentacles?” Ragnar asks.

“No, development of sentience in plant forms after prolonged exposure to Cthulhic influences,” Athelstan absently corrects, and then flushes. “It—it makes sense when you know that the whole Averoigne incident ultimately was a cult mistaking a botanically-based Cthulhic mutant for the real Shub-Niggurath, and. Anyway.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Lagertha says, her voice dropping a little, as she gathers herself up and moves over towards him. When he stiffens, she…picks up the plate instead, and as he relaxes, simply twists around so that suddenly they’re sitting next to each other. “We would like to know you better, and we can explain werewolves, if you would like to explain the Cthulhic…things. And…”

“We can have sex,” Ragnar says. Ignores the look Lagertha shoots him, but it’s not so that he can look smug. He actually looks quite serious. “Later. Or now. You can explain it, if you want, and we can say yes or no, and I think that is all.”

Lagertha presses her lips together, then picks up the glass. She holds that and the plate for a moment, then turns and holds them out to Athelstan. “But either way you should eat. You barely do, and that is not healthy.”

For someone who studies what he studies, there really shouldn’t be much on earth that can catch Athelstan off-guard these days. And yet, he’s rarely ever felt this much out of his depth. “You really want to know.”

“Yes,” Lagertha says. Then, as he keeps staring at her, she leans over and balances the plate on his knee. She pauses, then moves the sandwich on it so that it teeters less. “Have the water at least.”

Athelstan snorts. Then giggles. Then catches himself, coughs into his hand, and…ends up with Ragnar grabbing the plate and saving the sandwich. He grimaces and sheepishly puts his hand out, and after a moment’s eying him, Ragnar…hands him the sandwich, keeping the plate. That’s about right, he thinks, as he takes a bite and absently allows Lagertha to wrap his fingers around the glass.

“The funny thing is,” he mumbles through his third bite, “Ecbert’s been on me to have a regular relationship.”

“Who’s Ecbert?” Ragnar casually asks.

“My dissertation advisor, and the dean of the University,” Athelstan says. “He thinks having different people all the time—I actually do have to have sex regularly, or else that—” he waves at the cottage “—happens, and he thinks it’d be less risky if I just dated someone.”

Lagertha is looking at the cottage when she speaks. “Do you not have to keep explaining if you don’t?”

“Well, in theory, but it hasn’t actually been that long and I was always with people who do this professionally—sex magic is fertility magic, so it’s got practical applications besides just shutting the gates, and,” Athelstan swallows hard. Takes a long drink of water, thinking about it, and then braces himself. “The paperwork is really more of a headache.”

“You have to fill out _paperwork_ to have sex?” Ragnar says.

“Just if it’s supposed to be professional, since the side-effects can affect their ability to work. If it’s a personal relationship and there’s no access to University resources, the Legal department sees it as sort of your own risk, I suppose,” Athelstan says. “So if we did this, you really would have to take that on all on your own.”

Ragnar and Lagertha flick quick looks at each other. “Why don’t you tell us more, and then we will make up our minds?” Lagertha says.

Athelstan swallows again. “Well…right. So first is timing…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yog-Sothoth was Clark Ashton-Smith's go-to Great Old One to reference, both for his Averoigne stories and for his other universes.
> 
> Ashton-Smith also was much less afraid of the idea of sex than Lovecraft was, but he did tend to go to the lecherous sorceress/sorcerer well a lot. 
> 
> In the TW part of this series, the Nemeton gets some ideas after a couple Cthulhu entities try to crash into Beacon Hills. Athelstan's area of study is coming out of the idea that I don't see why that couldn't have happened in multiple places in the world.


	8. Chapter 8

About ten minutes into the explanation, Ragnar suggests that one of them go back inside the cottage and get Athelstan’s luggage so he has all of his tools and can point to them instead of trying to describe them. He and Lagertha both have excellent English, but it seems that Athelstan’s tendency to drop words or talk around them when embarrassed makes it difficult to visualize what he means. Which makes sense.

What doesn’t quite make sense, at least at first, is how they immediately begin to debate the…the sex toys, Athelstan makes himself think. It’s the security of his own mind and he can at least think the terms without blushing.

Sex toys. They’re sex toys, and Ragnar and Lagertha are having a very vigorous argument about the relative merits of a cock-ring versus a cock cage, to the point that they’ll occasionally slip into Norwegian, then remember themselves and go back to English for Athelstan’s benefit. “The _coming_ has to be on time,” Ragnar is saying. “So it is better if as soon as you need it to happen, it can happen. With that—” he jerks his chin at the cage “—you will always have a delay.”

“It is not much of a delay, with you,” Lagertha says. She lets Ragnar start to look pleased with himself, then picks the cage out of his hand. “I think you just don’t like it to be too difficult.”

Ragnar sighs and rolls his eyes. “Sex is not supposed to be _difficult_.”

“Right,” Athelstan says, and when Ragnar blinks, he reaches over and grabs the cock cage from them. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. This really isn’t how it’s supposed to work, I know that, and—”

A sheepish look crosses Ragnar’s face, but before he can get out what he clearly wants to say, Lagertha pushes across him and over to Athelstan, who thinks she’s going for the cage. She is not, and when he half-curls around it, she reaches past him for the cock-ring. “It is _not_ difficult,” she says, as she pulls back and then matter-of-factly reaches into the front of Ragnar’s pants. “Look. One move.”

Ragnar’s brows jump up but instead of pushing her off, he just leans back on his elbows and watches with a bemused look as she pulls his cock out and fastens the ring around its base. She sits back and they both regard the…situation. He moves a little, fully uncrossing his legs and flattening his knees, and she reaches over and pulls his pants open, then halfway down his hips.

“Not difficult,” she says again, hands planted on either side of Ragnar’s hips, coolly assessing what is a very…

_Beautiful_ , Athelstan thinks, and then shies away from it. Then, even before they glance over at him, he’s wondering why. There’s no reason why it isn’t an appropriate description of Ragnar’s cock, well-shaped and generously-sized as it is. Its skin is much paler than the rest of Ragnar, but in a…a healthy, warm way, not at all like the fish-belly white Athelstan knows he is, and the floss around it is so blond as to be almost invisible. 

Well, at first. Even as he’s watching, a flush is starting up Ragnar’s cock, so that the hairs at the base stand out in contrast. Then he twitches, his own cheeks burning, as Ragnar lets out a lazy, rumbling chuckle and flops backward, his arms carelessly out to either side of his head.

“Stay in the circle,” Athelstan mutters reflexively.

Ragnar blinks and pulls in his right hand. Then starts to twist over; he bumps Lagertha with his knee and her upper lip rises to show fangs. She shakes off his leg and turns to Athelstan—behind her, Ragnar’s gone loose again, arm dropping liquidly across Lagertha’s back—her bare shoulders tugging out of her shirt. “I think I can control myself without help,” she says. Her voice is lower, rolling on her vowels, but she stops just short of Athelstan’s feet. “You did not have anything for women.”

“I…well, usually they can…stop themselves,” Athelstan says, stumbling his way through his thoughts. He can feel the grass bending under his clenching fingers. “There are spells too, but—”

“Do we need that?” Lagertha says, and now she does crawl over him. With Ragnar, who’s lying haphazardly over her, chin rocking against the lowest point of the curve of her spine, grinning at Athelstan. “Can you just tell me?”

Athelstan bites his lip, and at the same time—he jerks his head to the side, then chokes back a curse as the grass outside of the circle really _is_ bending. Not as if it’s in the wind or anything normal like that, but as if—he hears a movement and whips back around to grab Lagertha’s wrist.

Her eyes redden and he remembers, _alpha werewolf_ and he freezes—and she’s still too. Just watching him, not mauling him. He grimaces, presses his lips together, looks at the air attempting to accommodate an extra dimension around them, and then…pulls her towards him.

“I don’t think you can step outside the circle right now,” he mutters. “I didn’t finish drawing it for—well, that would’ve been just for me anyway, and for actually having sex with—”

“Athelstan,” Lagertha says, calmly, firmly, without any of…teasing, she’d sounded teasing before. She doesn’t now. And when he looks at her, she puts her fingertips on either side of his jaw and they’re cool and…steadying. “What should we do?”

They’re asking _him_? he thinks. And yes, they are. They are asking him, and…he opens his mouth, closes it, thinks about telling them this is absolutely a terrible idea, and…does not, because really, it isn’t. Not if done properly, and if he’s honest with himself, his fear is that he will _not_ do it properly. Not that they won’t.

But the whole point of his sabbatical is to learn how to manage this. He should face up to that—he has to face up to that. He can’t just avoid the problem; if the past twenty-four hours have taught him anything, it’s that. Either he learns how to not let his pent-up libido open up rifts for Great Old Ones, or he learns to live in places where those are going to open up anyway, and…he doesn’t really like tentacles.

He might like werewolves, he has to admit, lifting his free hand to Lagertha’s breast and seeing how her eyes tint red. Up close it’s fascinating how that happens: not at all like eyes going bloodshot, not veins working into the iris but a pure wash of color.

And then she leans in. “No, you can’t—” Athelstan stammers.

Lagertha stops. Waits. Looks curious.

“I have to—I need to be able to talk. Chant.” Athelstan fidgets absently with her wrist, then catches himself. “I need my, ah, hands too—”

She grabs his hand, gently, when he lets go of her. Then runs her fingers up his arm and down over his chest, smiling. “Can I take this off?”

“I…yes, probably, before I start chanting,” Athelstan says. Bumbles. “Might as well.”

Lagertha’s smile widens. Then she skims her fingers under his top and in a smooth motion he doesn’t quite feel, she has his shirt off. Her buttock rubs up and onto his thigh and he lifts his hand, then puts it back down on the ground. He doesn’t have to get up.

“What about his pants?” Ragnar says, and then he and Lagertha both look at Athelstan.

“I suppose they go too,” Athelstan mutters. Then thinks to retrieve his phone from the pocket first, since he probably wants it near in case his memory fails. It hasn’t before, but then he doesn’t think he was this…distracted the other times.

Ragnar puts one hand on Athelstan’s knee, but instead of attacking his pants as he expects, the other man humps himself up and finishes twisting out of his own. He lifts a leg to kick, but before Athelstan can protest, catches himself. Ducks his head under Lagertha’s sharp look and just peels them off his feet before twisting over to catch at Lagertha’s waistband.

Lagertha spits something at Ragnar that just makes him snicker, his hands sliding up her bared thighs. They get to the top, then stop, fingertips just where the hair—she’s a darker blonde than Ragnar, surprisingly—starts, and Ragnar gives Athelstan an inquiring look.

“Oh, you don’t—you don’t have to wait for me,” Athelstan says, guessing at what he’s going to ask and trying and failing to unlock the phone at the same time. “Just—she can’t—you can’t come till—”

“Can _you_?” Ragnar says, as his right thumb slides smoothly across the rounded mound of Lagertha’s groin and then disappears between her legs. He hikes himself up, arching a little as Lagertha takes a long, sucking breath, and then lets go of Athelstan’s knee so that he can redrape himself across Lagertha, his head now over Athelstan’s hip.

“Ah…yes—but—” Athelstan stiffens as Lagertha rolls towards Ragnar and lifts herself, reaching towards him.

She stops, head cocked, and then puts her hand on Ragnar’s shoulder as he dips and nuzzles behind her ear. They’re looking at each other but somehow Athelstan knows it’s really him they’re minding.

And that is—he shifts uncomfortably, and then in a sudden rush of reckless will, pulls open his fly and wriggles out of his pants. He breathes a little in relief as his more than half-way there erection comes free, then catches something out of the corner of his eye and freezes again.

They’re looking at him now. He can see the way the muscles in Ragnar’s shoulders and back and upper arms flex, slow but easy. Ragnar could—either of them could push up and leap on him with less effort than it takes him to blink. They’re thinking about it. He can see that. But they’re not, and realizing that makes him a little dizzy.

He breathes in through his mouth; the rough sound of it more than the air helps to clear his head. He glances down at his phone, which is finally unlocked, and swipes to the right app and pulls up the correct chant and he does, in fact, remember his pronunciation. Even if he thinks it’s not just the reality outside of the circle that’s vibrating to an unearthly force right now.

“I can, my timing doesn’t matter as much, but if I say something the wrong way it could be a problem,” Athelstan mutters. His screen is—he swipes at the bead of water running down it, then realizes it’s because his hands are sweaty. “That is, I could accidentally—”

“Should you come before that?” Lagertha asks, in all seriousness.

Athelstan looks up, then immediately back down, biting his lip. Then he looks up again, pushing up on one arm as Ragnar and Lagertha abruptly twist together. At first he thinks they’ve gotten tired of him and have decided to just—satisfy each other, but then he sees how their lips are peeling back into snarls. They’re looking at the widening ripples in the air just outside of the circle—possibly smelling something as well, as he sees Lagertha’s nostrils flare.

Then she jerks forward as if she’s going to leave the circle and she can’t—he lunges forward and catches her by the arm, ducking when she immediately turns and growls at him. Her foot slides towards the perimeter and he climbs over her leg to pull it back while saying the first stanza. Then his hand lands on something small and hard but slightly yielding: a tube of lubricant. 

Well, he’s let things get too far along to not properly close them now. He drops onto his elbow on the ground, then moves it to pin the end of the tube so he can twist the cap off with his free hand. Only it seems to be…he lifts it, annoyed, and then puts it down as he catches himself because this is _not_ the canto where you want to take an unexpected breath. Then nearly stutters anyway when something yanks the tube away.

Athelstan rolls, only for a hand to grab his shoulder as he—right, _he_ was almost going to fall out of the circle. Ragnar stares at him for a second, then plucks his phone off the grass and hands it to him. The sweat on his palms makes Athelstan fumble the phone and nearly drop it, and he curls up quickly to keep it from sliding off his stomach. One of them, he’s not sure which, pulls at his shoulder to tilt him towards them and away from the edge.

Must be Lagertha, because Ragnar grabs the phone again and this time, keeps hold of it. Athelstan glances at him, then at the screen. Pokes out a tentative finger and scrolls up. Ragnar grunts, rustles something, and then rearranges himself so that his forearm is resting on Athelstan’s shoulder. Then tries to twist around to do something while keeping the screen in place for Athelstan to see.

This part’s just repeating the preceding thirty syllables, so Athelstan risks a glance down and sees that Ragnar’s lying across something that’s clearly uncomfortable, and trying to dig it out from under himself. Athelstan snakes his hand down and worms it under Ragnar’s side; Ragnar bows up and he just manages to snag out the…oh, it’s one of the gags. He flushes and Ragnar starts to laugh, only to suddenly cut himself off.

He looks up. Ragnar bobs his head, looking…apologetic? And then puts the phone back in Athelstan’s face. 

Actually, Athelstan’s starting to find his rhythm in the chanting—with enough experience, the real problem with a language like Aklo is remembering to not let it _fully_ possess you—and he reaches out and nudges Ragnar’s wrist down. Then pauses, hand still there, as he happens to see Ragnar’s groin and…the cock-ring works. On werewolves. 

Well, that’s a ridiculous thought, part of him says, they have Earth-based anatomy just like him, as his hand and arm decide to pull him up and over so that he can get a better look. Ragnar lets out a startled noise, moves slightly, and then stills as Athelstan touches the man’s hip before he can help himself. Athelstan’s blushing like mad, he knows that, but…he looks up, and around, and watches as the air goes unnaturally still.

There is this moment—there is _always_ one moment, when he can feel the power coursing through him, the way that the curves of time run not logically or rationally but simply _run_ , they run like electric rivers and he can see all along the length of them, and he is no closer to understanding these alien forces who wish to rip open the barriers between his and their worlds but he _knows_ what they seek here. He knows, because he too finds it pleasurable.

Athelstan is brought back down by the smallest thing, just a shift under his hand. But it’s enough to drag him back into his own skin, and then he’s gasping a little, blinking hard, his phone gone and his fingers curled tightly around his own erection. So tightly it’s painful, but at the same time he’s almost convinced it’s necessary, to keep his skin from splitting open and letting out the curves of time still trying to run through him.

Someone’s saying something to him. And twisting his wrist, that’s why he’s not frantically jerking himself off. He blinks again, and Lagertha gives up on trying to pull his hand away and instead drops her head and laves roughly around his fingers with her tongue. The feel of it startles him and he lifts his hand—his other hand, the one that’d been digging into Ragnar’s hip. He has blood under his nails.

He grimaces and reaches for Ragnar again, only to have the phone—Athelstan halfway slaps at it, only for Ragnar to jerk it away. Then, brow raised, a surprised but intensely interested expression on his face, Ragnar puts it screen-up on the ground and then coils around to touch at the short but deep scratches Athelstan’s left on him. They’re already nearly closed but Ragnar brushes his fingers over the blood, rubs the tips together, and then reaches, slowly, eyes on Athelstan’s face, for Athelstan’s cock.

Lagertha puts an arm up—she has the lubricant, with the top off, and she tries to push it into Ragnar’s hand. He snarls at her and she lifts her head from Athelstan and right about then, the air _flexes_ , reminding Athelstan he’s got to move onto the next set of chants.

“I come at the end here, then one of you comes at the end of the next one,” he spits out, and then, before he can think too much about it, he grabs the lubricant.

A good gobful squirts out onto his fingers, more than enough, and he pushes the tube away as he climbs on top of a _very_ startled Ragnar, who says something in Norwegian that makes Lagertha let out a throaty, not-sympathetic chuckle. She eels up next to Athelstan, running her fingers along Ragnar’s abdomen as he shifts backwards to accommodate Athelstan. 

His eyes widen when Athelstan first touches his cock. The corners of his mouth jerk back into a near-snarl, his canines long and pointed, and then, with a visible effort, he settles himself. Rolls his shoulders almost showily, as he raises his still-bloody hand and lazily drags his fingers down the middle of his torso.

Lagertha smiles and leans over to lick at the blood as Ragnar twitches under Athelstan. The man’s a wiggler, and it’s a little—the second time Athelstan nearly bounces on the wrong syllable, he loses his patience and, instead of pulling at Ragnar’s cock, drops his hand and squeezes the man’s balls.

Ragnar goes stiff, his now-clawed fingers ripping audibly into the ground. He and Athelstan stare at each other—thankfully, Athelstan has a well-developed ability to chant in the face of things that can kill him—and then something shifts in Ragnar’s face. His lips peel back into another snarl, but not at Athelstan—not in the murdering sense, anyway. Athelstan dares to theorize and moves his fingers back to Ragnar’s cock, grips the top, pushes the snug circle slowly down, and Ragnar shudders, slowly, that shift in his expression going even hazier.

“One of us,” Lagertha says. Her English is almost bruising, not because of her accent but because Athelstan just—she seems to understand about the disorientation and puts her hands up, cradles his head. “Either?”

He’s chanting so he nods. She smiles, and reaches for his hand—Ragnar lets out another complaint in Norwegian but she doesn’t even look back—and pulls it from Ragnar’s cock to her, fingers twisting in Athelstan’s so that they—she doesn’t even stop before suddenly she’s gasping, pupils dilated, as their fingers together sink into her well past the second knuckle. She rears towards him, lips parting, then abruptly jerks herself back.

She’d been going to bite him, faintly registers in Athelstan’s mind. He probably should be more alarmed about it, but Lagertha’s instead shifted forward, her breasts pressing directly against him as he loops his free arm over her shoulders for balance. She clenches around him and he curls his thumb, pushes up, thinking what he’s feeling is—it is, she _likes_ that, her fangs showing again.

“Not yet,” he spits out at the next breath break. He moves his weight back to take some of it off the arm bent between them, and she seems to think it means something else because she lets his wrist go and his finger slides out of her.

Before he can look to see if she wants it back, Lagertha rolls herself up, then down, and Ragnar bucks sharply under them. Athelstan hisses, thinking she’s going to—her head snaps up and she’s growling but he shakes his head. She growls again, so he has to raise his voice to keep the chant going, and then reluctantly stops rolling her hips. 

She’s rather more enthusiastic about slapping Ragnar’s thighs to keep him still. Ragnar’s teeth audibly click together in frustration, but Lagertha ignores him. Looks instead at Athelstan’s cock.

He knows what she’s thinking. He grabs her shoulder and shakes his head. She snarls at him and he—if it’s in the middle of this canto they will be _nightgaunt_ food, he thinks—and something must get through because Lagertha doesn’t move.

But she doesn’t move _back_ either. The next time he takes a breath, she pricks alert and he could take a second breath, but now he’s slightly, irrationally, annoyed and he starts the next canto. Lagertha snorts and puts her hand between her legs. Then pulls it away after a second, looking at him. “You come first,” she says.

Athelstan nods. Then jerks his knees up as she shifts forward.

“I won’t,” she says. She pauses, then touches one of his knees. Not a caress, just a tap, before she goes on in a softer, less irritated voice. “I will not, until you say. I remember what you said. But…if I am waiting…”

“He needs his mouth,” Ragnar mutters.

Lagertha glances behind her. Then looks at Athelstan. She’s a little unsure, he realizes. This doesn’t seem to be something she’s used to doing. “I would like to,” she says. “If I can…”

It takes a few seconds longer than normal for Athelstan to recall how long of a breath break he has next. He thinks about it, and then nods.

Grinning, Lagertha is on him immediately. He sucks his breath in surprise and she stops, one hand on his shoulder, the other wrapped around the base of his cock and blocking her from sinking all the way down it. And she does wait, even as her thighs start to tremble, till he catches up and nods again.

She lowers herself the remaining way a little less precipitously. It still knocks Athelstan over, and he’s glad for Ragnar’s lightning-fast squirm around to grab his arm and keep him from bumping his head. He’s also glad that he finished the canto first, since he certainly doesn’t have enough air to start the next one.

“He needs his mouth,” Ragnar says again, less pointedly, more amused, and gives Athelstan a light thump on the breastbone. 

Athelstan gasps, then—well, not right this instant, he thinks and stretches over to kiss Ragnar as Lagertha arches on his cock.

He’s caught Ragnar off-guard again. The other man is still, and then deeply invested in the kiss, hauling himself up to stick an arm under Athelstan’s head, propping it at an angle where it seems like his tongue can travel straight down Athelstan’s throat. At the same time, Lagertha leans forward and her body presses around Athelstan and—he needs to not pass out, Athelstan thinks desperately. He needs to not pass out, not pass out, he needs to finish this because he does _not_ want to be—he wants them. He doesn’t want them dead.

It adds a little bit of a hysterical edge to his climax. Not too much, it’s still an orgasm, after all, and anyway, it’s probably what keeps him on track for the _ritual_ he’s trying to perform.

“All right,” he gasps, pulling away from Ragnar, and then he catches sight of Lagertha’s face. “Wait, no, not—I’ll nod. I’ll nod, you watch me, I’ll nod. I’ll—”

Lagertha nods curtly, her hair sticking in soaked curls to the sides of her face. Her lip is bleeding—she’s chewing at it, reopening the wounds before they can fully heal. He winces but she nods impatiently at him and he goes back into chanting. Then it occurs to him that he’s softening and he levers himself up—Ragnar lends his arm—and starts to reach in between him and Lagertha, only for her to snarl at him.

Athelstan jerks his hand back and she grimaces, then waves her hand for him to go one. He does, possibly rushing a little, but cadence is generally less important than enunciation, and—he finally gets to the part where he can nod. When he does, Lagertha lets out a small, relieved noise, right before she seizes up so sharply that her eyes roll back into her head and his cock just slips right out of her.

Alarmed, Athelstan grabs at her, but she still somehow manages to intercept his wrist. Ragnar’s laughing again—it’s fine. It looks incredibly alarming, but it’s fine.

Eventually, Lagertha’s head comes back down. She shivers one more time, much more languidly, and then turns her head as Ragnar sits up and leans in to nuzzle at her neck. Her arm comes up around him, gripping at his shoulderblade as if she’s going to pull him off, and then she tilts her head and their mouths seal around each other.

Honestly, watching them is more detrimental to Athelstan’s concentration than actually coming. He ends up peeling his eyes away so that he doesn’t accidentally repeat the wrong line and that’s when he sees the man standing just outside the circle with a raised ax.

Lagertha sees him too, and shoves Ragnar off while scrabbling behind her. “Sigva—”

Athelstan throws his arm out in front of Ragnar, blocking him as the man turns, and deliberately drops a word. Outside of the cottage, in the outdoors, there are few angles but the sharp edges of the ax are sufficient and things slip open just a little. The man senses it and shifts halfway before it gets between his skins and they start to separate. That’s when Athelstan closes his eyes.

“He’s gone,” Ragnar says a moment later, his voice oddly hushed.

When Athelstan tries to open his eyes to check, they probably end up so open they’re nearly falling out of his head, because Ragnar’s grabbed both sides of his head and pushed him back down on the ground and is bobbing over him in excitement. Ragnar starts to say something, shakes his head, and starts again in English. 

“When are you done?” he says. “I want to—that was fantastic and I want to—tell me I can. Tell me, _tell_ me—”

Lagertha’s hitting Ragnar’s shoulder, but he’s ignoring her, looking at Athelstan as if Athelstan’s just pulled him out of the grip of Azathoth. His eyes are glowing. Not red, but blue—not werewolf blue, just, somehow, they’re filled with light and it’s because of Athelstan.

Athelstan puts his hand up. He’s touching Ragnar’s neck just because that’s what’s nearest, and then he remembers that is not something werewolves—that means something different for werewolves, he can’t remember anything except for that. Ragnar freezes for a second, but then his eyes half-close and Athelstan thinks he might try and kiss Athelstan anyway, and grabs his throat to stop him.

Ragnar makes a strange low noise, not a growl or a snarl, but just as guttural, and his pupils almost swallow the rest of his eyes. He holds, though Athelstan can feel the tension running through him, and then, when Athelstan finishes the canto, is down on Athelstan barely after Athelstan nods.

“Does he still need to wait?” Lagertha says from above him, almost casually. She’s running her hands over Ragnar’s shoulders and back as he does his best to imprint himself on every part of Athelstan’s mouth. “I think the ring is bending.”

It is? And a part of Athelstan wants to look, because…honestly, he’d been wondering, with the enhanced strength. 

Another, larger part of Athelstan wants to just say yes, because this is _much_ more tiring than bringing himself off, even if doing it that way means he has to come at least three times. But…no, properly, he reminds himself. “Two more cantos,” he says, as Ragnar lets his mouth go to look hopefully at him.

Ragnar growls. Athelstan sighs, preparing to explain that this just isn’t something he can help, it’s what the Pnakotic Manuscripts say, and then Ragnar’s shoulders slump a little.

“Can you say them faster?” he asks in a plaintive tone.

Athelstan looks at him, and then Lagertha pulls him off, pinning him down as he half-heartedly protests. “Do what you must,” she says to Athelstan. “We will wait.”

They really will, he thinks. And he’s filthy—they all are, covered in sweat and clumps of grass and dirt and tacky bodily fluids—and he just let a werewolf be eaten by the Hounds of Tindalos and somehow he feels quite all right about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frank Belknap Long's _Hounds of Tindalos_ came up with the idea that normal things exist on time that curves, while vicious monsters exist on time that angles, so usually the two don't cross but things like time travel can bend you into the monster dimension. And also generally Lovecraftian stories demonize geometry. Anyway, the Hounds aren't really hounds, but they relentlessly track you like hounds.


	9. Chapter 9

Athelstan feels slightly less all right when, having finally finished the ritual, he lets them out of the circle and Ragnar promptly goes to the scuff-marks that’s all that remains of this Sigvard, squats to sniff at them, and lets out a satisfied noise.

“I think this is useful,” he says. “This would have been a better way to take care of Einar.”

“That’s not what magic like that is for,” Athelstan says sharply, as Lagertha looks up from where she’s trying to pile together all the various items they brought out. Ragnar blinks at him, then gives him an open-mouthed, fanged, amused grin, shoulders and hips shifting, and—Athelstan doesn’t give a damn if the man’s about to eat him. “I don’t use it for that.”

Ragnar tilts his head. Puzzled, but still not quite seeing the seriousness. “But you did.”

“I—I don’t _want_ to use it for that,” Athelstan snaps, getting up. His back, his legs, other parts of them, they _ache_ , but the anger in him makes that fade. “I didn’t show you so we could talk about it like that, if I’d wanted to be that sort of person I would have stayed in Vyones with the necro—”

He grabs the nearest items without looking at them and then stalks back to the cottage. The door opens before he touches it and a small part of his mind raises a warning, but it’s weak—no, he really shouldn’t be doing things like that, not when he’d just repowered the entire cottage’s spellwork, but he can fix it later. That is something he _can_ fix.

Athelstan tosses whatever he’s brought with him into the sink, then reaches for the tap. Then pulls his hands back. He rubs them against his thighs, tacky layers coming off under his nails, and then takes a deep breath. He needs to calm down, he thinks, watching the runes around the sink periodically flare purple and yellow. This isn’t any better than being sexually frustrated, and it also isn’t going to be something he can safely vent via a physical outlet.

He takes a shower. It’s his first time trying it in the cottage, and he shivers through five minutes of icy water before he figures out that the little lever running around the bottom half of the shower knob controls the temperature.

Though even after that, the water doesn’t warm up much, and by the time he steps out, he’s clean but he also feels as if he’s halfway to hypothermia. At least trying to keep his teeth from chattering out of his head also means he’s too distracted to be angry.

Just regretful. It’d been a bad idea all along, and he’d let himself be carried away by two almost-strangers, simply because…because they hadn’t seemed to balk at anything he told them, and it’d been a while since he’d socialized much with anyone besides Ecbert and the people Ecbert could blackmail. He _is_ tired of people, including himself, shying away from what happened to him in Averoigne. He can see that, and in that context, isolating himself in the Scandinavian wilderness probably had been the wrong idea. But still, he should know better.

“Athelstan,” says Gunnhild.

She stands in the middle of the cottage as he yelps and yanks the towel up around himself nearly to the point of baring his genitals, then resettles it back to decent levels. “You’re back!” he bleats.

As usual, Gunnhild looks unimpressed. “Yes, I said I would be.” She pauses. “You have a—”

“I—yes, sorry, they attacked while I was trying to—” Athelstan starts to use one of his euphemisms and then makes a face at himself. Stop hiding already. “I thought I’d have sex, so I’d stop warping reality around here. Sorry.”

“The distortion levels are down thirty percent,” Gunnhild says, not as if she’s forgiving him, but as if she assumes that would be what he’s looking to her for. “But now we have to cleanse for the Hounds too. This will be complicated, so close to dealing with one of her Young.”

Athelstan sighs. “I wasn’t really thinking about entity compatibility, I just…I don’t know, they’re werewolves? It was on the mind.”

A small furrow appears between Gunnhild’s brows, and for a moment, she appears to be on the verge of saying something.

Instead she turns around and walks out of the cottage. Just outside he can see two trucks and two other Patrol members wrestling with armfuls of long, thin tubes. Then Ragnar comes into view. One of them turns as he asks them something, glances at Gunnhild, and then hands him the tubes. He hefts them over one shoulder and steps back, and the two women reach back into the truck and heave out a portable generator.

Ragnar watches them, clearly a little bemused at being given the lightweight tubes and not the generator. Then he starts to turn away, as if called, and his eyes sweep through the doorway and find Athelstan.

He pauses. Lagertha comes into view, stepping up to him even as her head turns to also look at Athelstan, and the two of them…they seem to be waiting for him to go outside again. But why, Athelstan wonders. 

And then he turns around. His phone’s outside, but his laptop is in here. He goes over and flips it open, and sends Ecbert an email telling him the sabbatical’s going to have to end early.

* * *

Predictably, Ecbert calls only a few minutes later, when Athelstan’s only halfway into a fresh set of trousers. _“My dear boy, you’re still on sabbatical,”_ he says, and continues relentlessly over Athelstan’s protests. _“Yes, yes, I did read the entire email and I agree, there’s no point in staying any longer at the lodge. I’m sure the cross-reverberations will be fascinating for the Patrol to monitor and cross-entity reactions are very hot right now, they’ll have another resident there in no time, but the entire purpose of your trip wasn’t really about the research, Athelstan. It was about giving you time to acclimate.”_

“Right, and—”

_“And while you are without a doubt one of the most dedicated men I have ever had the privilege, no, pleasure to know, there is no possible way that you’ve fully addressed all outstanding items on your assessment,”_ Ecbert goes on, sounding as if he’s swooping down a hallway somewhere. Athelstan checks the time, but it’s…the weekend. _“You’re an incredibly promising young man and I refuse to see such potential go to waste. Waste!”_

“I didn’t say I was going to stop trying to—”

_“What you need, and I realize I’ve told you this before, but indulge an old man, is to relax, Athelstan.”_ Ecbert opens and shuts a door, and then steps into a large enough space that Athelstan can hear the echoing of his footsteps. He has to be in the University’s main library. _“These things don’t happen overnight. It’s a lifestyle, and I’m sure it’s been a rather extreme adjustment for you, I’m equally as sure that if you simply persevere, you’ll see that everything that’s come to pass is in your best—”_

Athelstan sighs and pulls his phone away from his ear. It’s glowing a muddy yellow. “What happened to the rich foreign students?”

_“What? Oh, I’ll find some others,”_ Ecbert says, as ghastly whispers ebb through the line. _“But my point is, you should stay in Norway. You’re better off there for now.”_

“Sir, are you invoking the oracles of Carcosa?” Athelstan asks. “You do know that the auditors charge extra for Saturday summonings, don’t you? The head librarian is going to be very—”

_“Oh, hang him, he was the one who damn well signed off on that renewal just so they’d send back that idiot assistant of his,”_ Ecbert snaps.

“That was his nephew,” Athelstan mutters.

Ecbert rattles off a fluid string of Aklo, then returns to the call. _“And as a blood relative, he should have known the boy didn’t have the self-control to leave a clearly-padlocked copy of the play alone. Now, why exactly do you think you need to leave Norway?”_

“I killed someone,” Athelstan blurts out.

_“Is it defensible without resorting to memory removal?”_ Ecbert asks. 

Athelstan’s known the Dean for far too long to let that put him off. “That’s not the point, the point is that I deliberately did it and I did it by putting a kink in time big enough to attract the Hounds of Tindalos and I did _that_ because I had partners this time! Sex partners!”

_“Oh, damn it,”_ Ecbert mutters, and then Athelstan’s phone stops glowing. _“Athelstan. Are you interested in employing your powers to destroy the world?”_

“No, of course not,” Athelstan says.

_“Well, what about just torturing humanity?”_ Ecbert asks. _“Also no? But if we consider a subset of humanity—”_

“This isn’t a slippery-slope argument,” Athelstan sighs, putting his hand over his face. “This is about the fact that I—”

_“Did something you’re normally morally uncomfortable with, due to the presence of other people, and now you’re possibly less sorry about it than you usually would be, because you’re human, Athelstan. You care when you have sexual intercourse with someone, even if it’s just to vent your newly-acquired occult powers, and that’s why you never can stand to use or be used,”_ Ecbert says, soothingly, as someone else who probably isn’t human or even in this dimension begins to chant in Aklo in the background. _“Which is exactly what you need when the alternative is self-centered genocidal insanity, so for the love of all that we do treasure, why are you trying to run away from it?”_

Athelstan opens his mouth to correct the man and then…cannot. 

Ecbert sighs. _“There is an unending supply of unprepared students of the eldritch horrors of the world, but only a very few who actually survive cohabiting with one and come back with an intact moral compass. And that, and not the sex magic, is what you went over there to face up to, Athelstan. You know it and I know it.”_

The sex magic actually is a bigger piece of it than that, and it’s not fully under control, it’s just manageable, and…Athelstan still can’t really say Ecbert is wrong. Well, he could, but that would be a lie, and he does try to do the right thing. “But why do I have to do this in Norway?” he finally ends up muttering. And then he remembers about the yellow glow. “And what on earth are you talking to Carcosa about on a Saturday—wait, is this about my other email? The one to Security? Are we actually dealing with an alum—”

_“All in good time, dear boy. Now, stay put, relax, enjoy yourself. I would appreciate it if you didn’t cause the Patrol to charge us for any more bodies, but if it comes up, just give me a ring,”_ Ecbert says in a gentle, half-attentive voice. The chanting in the background is already escalating. _“There’s no need to run back here just because you’ve met someone compatible. Have some fun! You’ve earned it.”_

And then Ecbert hangs up on him. Athelstan gapes at his phone, watching the yellow glow slowly retract, tendril by tendril. A small part of him wonders if this is all part of a slow spiral into madness…but the greater, more experienced part of him knows full well that that is the actual reality of Ecbert. It’s just he rarely sees that directed at _him_.

“Athelstan,” someone says.

Also, Athelstan realizes, Ecbert more or less confirmed his wild guess about the rogue sorcerer. And since the description hadn’t immediately matched up to any of the banned alums publicly listed, then they must be—he yanks his laptop forward and starts to type, only to realize the University system has automatically logged him out. Sighing, he logs back in, absently waving his left hand in the appropriate way to get into the faculty-only section straight off.

“Athelstan,” someone says. “We would like to talk to you.”

He navigates to the Security portal and flicks down the list again, then frowns. Scrolls back up and then down, more slowly. Nothing has changed there. But if there aren’t additional names behind the faculty wall, then it has to be one of the ones already listed, just without all the information included. And in that case, Ecbert…

“Athelstan?” 

“He _knows_ them,” Athelstan concludes. “He knows them, and—they must have been on the teaching staff at some point. There’s no other reason why you wouldn’t just put on all the details, not if they’re so prohibited that you’d go straight to Carcosa instead of just reaching out to the nearest Yellow Sign auditor station. Good God, I wonder if _that_ is why I can’t leave now.”

“You were leaving?” someone says, louder, in an alarmed voice.

Athelstan looks up. Ragnar and Lagertha are standing next to the table, still smelling strongly enough of ozone that they must have just been passed through the electric pentacle, and Lagertha has a death-grip on Ragnar’s arm because Ragnar looks like he’s just retreating from an aborted lunge. 

“I,” Athelstan starts, as he also observes the grass- and dirt- stains still smudged over their skin. They’re dressed, but somehow, that only seems to call more attention to the dirty spots. “Er. Well. I.”

“Athelstan, we wanted to tell you something,” Lagertha says. Her hands reposition on Ragnar’s arm, less restraining him, more supporting herself. She occasionally drops her head as she talks, though her eyes never drop. “We are not interested in your magic.”

“I…but you are,” Athelstan can’t help but point out, even before Ragnar twitches.

“We are not interested in _using_ your magic,” Lagertha amends. She pauses, not looking over, but it’s clear she’s waiting on Ragnar for something. “You are not—”

“It’s interesting,” Ragnar breaks in, as Lagertha briefly looks disgruntled. He tilts his head towards her, aware of it, but goes on. He’s twitching more…twitching nervously? “It is. I like seeing it, and I want to learn more about it. But I don’t want to—you are not just a—” that word again “—for us to hire, or use. We like—”

“What does that mean?” Athelstan asks. Then gestures, meaninglessly, when they stare at him. “That word. Gulon?”

Lagertha gives him a small approving nod for the pronunciation, and then seems a little hesitant to explain. “It is slang,” she finally says. “It is what we call a werewolf who has lost their control, and who thinks of nothing but themselves.”

“It is not just what we call werewolves, we call anyone who is greedy for power that,” Ragnar says. “But I was saying—”

“Oh, is this about the power transference if you kill an alpha?” Athelstan says without thinking. Then he winces. “Not that I was—I would never suggest—”

“Well, exactly. You don’t want to kill us, or use us. You want to keep us alive,” Ragnar says. He tucks his chin in slightly. “We appreciate that.”

“I…think that that’s natural,” Athelstan says. “But look, I think I know what you’re getting at and—”

“We can promise,” Ragnar says, quickly, with more than a trace of nervousness. “We can kill our own—we are more than happy to take care of any killing. You would never need to…unless you wanted to, but if you don’t want to—”

He folds abruptly, as if Lagertha had elbowed him. “That is also fine,” Lagertha says, with a half-look at Ragnar. Then she turns her full attention on Athelstan. “It is not that you can kill that interests us about you. We like you, and we like hearing about your—studies, and we like…telling you about werewolves.”

Athelstan starts to speak, then bites his lip. It’s not that he disbelieves them, and he doesn’t think he’s particularly gullible; his problem has always been more along the lines of spotting the red flag and then not heeding it. He thinks they are being sincere right now, but at the same time…they’ve told plenty of half-truths in the short time he’s known them.

“You don’t ever believe us,” Ragnar says suddenly. He absently catches the elbow Lagertha attempts to jab into him, still looking at Athelstan. “Why is this? Do you think we are trying to use you?”

“I—don’t know,” Athelstan admits. 

“Do people usually do that?” Lagertha asks, peering intently at him. When he looks at her, her lips twitch as if to curl back into a snarl, and then she takes a deep breath. She puts her hand out, pausing just short of his arm, and then she just lays her fingertips against him. “We can kill our own enemies, Athelstan. We will do that, if that makes you more comfortable.”

“It _is_ fun to watch you do it,” Ragnar says. This time, he lets Lagertha hit him. He grunts, swaying into her, and then grabs her shoulder so that her arm is trapped between their bodies. He’s almost grinning at Athelstan but not quite, too much of his energy going into the way he’s staring at Athelstan’s face. “It is. I am not lying, I liked watching it. I don’t _care_ if you kill them, but if you don’t, I also don’t care. They’re my enemies, I can deal with them and you don’t need to see. If you don’t want to. I just—we just want to talk with you.”

“And have sex,” Athelstan can’t help saying.

Ragnar grimaces, and again, it looks playful but it’s slightly too intense. “If you don’t want to, we can just talk.”

“I…don’t know,” Athelstan says. He shifts backward and they both tense up, and that just makes him want to turn and bolt, even though he doesn’t need to recall basic were de-escalation training to know that’s the exact wrong thing to do. “I’m sorry, I just…look, I’ve been here only a few days, and I’m still getting used to all this sex magic—I nearly blew out an entire laboratory floor back in Brichester, because one of the other grad students asked if I’d like to go to dinner, and I got here to try and sort that out and instead you and werewolves and I—oh, God, I haven’t even told Ecbert about the _fragments_ and now he’s calling Carcosa and—it’s a lot. I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s just—a lot.”

For a long time they stare at him, not that he can blame them. He probably sounds like he’s succumbing to the very Cthulhic-induced madness he’s been trying to warn them against, and…maybe that would finally get them to leave him alone.

He’s only just had that thought when Lagertha suddenly nods. “I see,” she says.

She glances at Ragnar, who has his lips pressed tightly together. He continues looking at Athelstan for a little longer, then abruptly returns Lagertha’s look. The two of them seem to reach the same conclusion, and then they walk out of the cottage.

Several minutes pass and they don’t return. They haven’t completely left the property, because he can see them every so often, talking to one or the other of the Elder Patrol personnel, but gradually he realizes they’re not coming back inside. So it really did work, he thinks.

Athelstan doesn’t expect to feel _happy_ about that, but…he also doesn’t expect to feel as regretful about it as he’s starting to. He barely knows them. And anyway, even if he did—even if he does like them, irrational as that is, then that’s all the more reason for them to keep their distance. 

There are other ways to help, he reminds himself, and begins to think about how he can transfer the data from the earlier scans off his phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ecbert is referring to the _King in Yellow_ , a fictional play from Robert W. Chambers' horror fantasy stories that drives people mad and warps reality. Carcosa is a fictional land within the play, and the Yellow Sign represents evil as well as calls it up. Which is something of an oversimplification, and you can read most of Chambers' stuff without gagging on period racism or misogyny, so I recommend you check out the originals at Project Gutenberg.


	10. Chapter 10

Athelstan’s third night in the Norwegian wilderness, he has a healthy amount of company, but no companions. Given the sensitivity of the area, Gunnhild and two other Patrol members stay to continue working on clean-up, but they do it from a tent they’ve pitched near their truck. They insist that Ragnar and Lagertha stay as well, to ensure that the cleansing they’d done really worked—since Athelstan’s magic had required significant changes to the standard ritual—but the two werewolves also choose to bed down outside, with borrowed sleeping bags but no tent. Athelstan’s the only one actually staying inside the cottage.

At least the wards have stabilized again, he thinks, lying on the bed with his laptop next to him. He’d spent most of the afternoon and evening either trying to analyze the data off his phone or trying to get hold of Ecbert, without much luck in either department. His advisor’s just not answering him and Athelstan has the sneaking fear it might be because Ecbert’s not actually in this dimension anymore. As for the data, it’s just odd—for seals that were broken two years ago, the numbers are far too high. 

It’s probably the recent Shub-Niggurath incursions. Or maybe it’s just Athelstan’s bizarre powers, and he should have just rubbed one out instead of chasing a mutated lichen into the woods and meeting a pair of strangely friendly werewolves. Or it’s just his inability to concentrate on important things, like his dissertation topic, or his desire to not be the one responsible for allowing a centuries-old evil loose into the world.

“All right, that’s enough,” Athelstan mutters, pushing himself up. He’s getting ridiculous even for his formerly-Catholic background.

It’s late enough that the Patrol has let their campfire go out, although the moon and stars provide enough light for Athelstan to see that they’re still sitting up inside their tent. He hesitates, then looks over at where Ragnar and Lagertha should be—and starts.

For no good reason. They’re there, curled up on the sleeping bags rather than in them, but then, it is a warm night. He can’t tell if they’re really asleep or not, or talking about whether waking up after twenty years is really worth all of this nonsense.

He moves on, toting his laptop and phone and a few extra electronics into the kitchen. He’s a botanist, not a member of the University’s Security staff, but if the person who turned Ragnar and Lagertha really is a Brichester alum…he doesn’t feel as if all he should do is sit around. Vyones more or less cured him of that.

And, he thinks as he sets down his laptop, he doesn’t really regret _that_. To be honest, he’s not really sure he regrets having his eyes opened either. And that worries him a little. He has firsthand knowledge of how much damage someone with no morals and a direct line to eldritch dimensions can do, and he—he doesn’t even want to inadvertently enable someone to become that, let alone be like that himself. And that’s the problem with sex magic being the vehicle, when you’re practicing it, it _does_ feel good. It’s not really designed to allow you to have critical intellectual distance.

Athelstan shakes his head, then connects laptop, phone, and external drives together. The data he has keeps showing traces that are far too recent, but with entities that frequently treat the fourth dimension as more of a suggestion, that’s a solvable conundrum. Anyway, at the least, he might be able to identify this mystery magic-worker and turn them over to Security before they go after Ragnar and Lagertha again. 

But the data keeps coming up the same no matter how many times Athelstan runs it. He finally sends the results to University Security, copying Ecbert, and then picks up the jar Gunnhild had given him and goes out the back door. 

Ragnar and Lagertha still are over by the Patrol tents. Of course they’ve got werewolf hearing and all that, and when he turns away and starts to walk towards the woods, Athelstan half-expects one of them to pop up. Or Gunnhild, or one of the other Patrol members.

But he gets to the edge of the woods completely unmolested, much to his…disappointment?

Disappointment, Athelstan thinks. He’d sort of started to get used to having someone always quizzing him. And he already knew he liked that, teaching, and honestly, he doesn’t often get a good audience. Most of the students Brichester lets in already think that they know more than the professors and half the battle is getting it into their heads that the University has had the luxury of developing its anti-Cthulhic-entity measures on the backs of _hundreds_ of previous students who also thought they knew better.

“And they really aren’t afraid of me,” he mutters to himself, putting the jar down on the ground and then moving a couple nearby rocks to hold it in place. “Which is fine—I don’t _want_ them or anyone to be afraid of me. So what is it, exactly, Athelstan? What am _I_ afraid of?”

This far from the cottage, he’s well out of range of any protective shielding, and he is standing on land that has absorbed the influences of dangerous cosmic entities for centuries. So doing any sort of tracking spell, much less one for certain magical practices even Brichester won’t allow, is a bit outside of standard operating practices. On the other hand, Athelstan’s just had sex, and he—can’t sort out his damn feelings about it so at the very least, he can bloody well use his powers to find someone who definitely _shouldn’t_ be out there.

He chants, waves his hands, side-steps the flexing of geometry when he’s supposed to, and when he’s done, he picks up his phone to get the GPS coordinates. Which are…right here.

Athelstan’s phone immediately activates a defensive sweeping scan, which is going to set off an alarm if it reaches Gunnhild or the werewolves because it’s very basic. Cursing, he shuts it off, but not before he’s simultaneously called up a column of protective Elder magic around himself, because his personal powers might get a bit wonky depending on his level of sexual frustration, but his phone is University-issued and it certainly shouldn’t have that problem.

And since someone runs into his shielding right away, this turns out to be the right move. 

They’re strong enough to just bounce right off, leaving a temporary silhouette burned into the column: a man, potbellied, with his hands crooked for a summoning gesture Athelstan thinks he recognizes. He drops the shielding and dodges sideways, starting a counter-spell, only to gag when he catches the smell of one of Shub-Niggurath’s Young in the air. Athelstan looks wildly up at the sky, seeing the tiniest beginnings of a rift near the treetops, and promptly abandons the counter-spell for one to deal with that.

His opponent shouts something in a triumphant tone and points towards Athelstan as something dark and hugely tubular and just— _wrong_ , wrong in color and opacity and transparency and all aspects of sight—looms up behind him. For a second Athelstan just stares, clutching his phone. And then the thing heaves up, showing what passes for a head.

“Are you insane?” he shouts back. “I mean—of course, you wouldn’t be if—but you can’t just bring a shoggoth to a Shub-Niggurath zone! She’ll _fertilize_ it, you—oh, for—”

The nearest thing to hand is the jar of evidence. Athelstan picks it up and slings it into the man’s face, where, because the man is too busy ordering the shoggoth to absorb Athelstan to block it, it shatters hard. Bloodily.

The man screams and abandons his ordering. Athelstan looks up at the sky, then at the advancing shoggoth, and then swallows his cursing in favor of the _fastest_ recitation of the Eighty-Eighth Interpretation of the Elder Sign he’s ever done. Even taking into account that one year he’d placed fourth in the annual banishing competition the Security team throws.

It's a very near thing, and the shoggoth comes close enough that Athelstan can feel his insides threatening to convulse up his throat, but he finishes in time. The shoggoth shudders, making his eyeballs squeeze in sympathy, and then lets out the horrendous shrieking call characteristic of its species and beats a hasty retreat…

Right into a glowing portal, which snaps immediately shut after it, revealing a panting Gunnhild. Athelstan stops wiping the blood from his nose and raises his hand to wave to her, and she waves ba—no, she’s pointing.

He twists around and his bellowing opponent crashes towards him, rivulets of blood streaming from ruined ey—Athelstan instinctively averts his gaze, stumbling away at the same time, and trips over something. 

This does have the happy accident of also making the man miss him. The man flounders against a tree instead, then rights himself with unexpected speed and twists around. The moonlight hits something shiny and long in his hand: a dagger the size of Athelstan’s forearm.

And then a long dark mass whisks between Athelstan and the man, slamming his opponent to the ground. The man’s yelling suddenly turns into a wet scream, which is abruptly ended in an equally wet _crunch_. Athelstan puts his hand out and gets hold of a tree…that moves.

“Get back,” Lagertha snarls, half-transformed, blonde fur streaking thickly down her shoulders and arms. “This one is ours. He is—”

“You can’t eat him! He’s a—you don’t know where he’s been, if you eat anything you don’t know where it might take you,” Athelstan blurts out.

Lagertha looks like she’s going to shove him out of the way. Over in the bushes, the crunching noises stop. A huge black hump pushes itself up, then back, shaking out arms and then a head. Then Ragnar turns around, fur receding from his face to leave behind the blood and bits of bone slicked across his cheeks.

“We don’t _eat_ people,” Ragnar says, a little exasperated. “What _did_ they tell you about wer—”

“The rift!” Athelstan shouts, remembering. He jerks free of Lagertha and runs over to Ragnar, looking up at the widening slit in the sky. 

Then he drops to his knees by the—he tries not to let his mind sort out which parts of the skull are supposed to be which, and instead just concentrates on grabbing the man’s ankles, which are still intact, and wrenching the body around so that it’s more or less under the slit. Ragnar turns too, reaching as if to help, but then Gunnhild arrives.

“You said you knew how to use it!” she yells, even though she and Athelstan are squatting right next to each other.

“Use what?” Athelstan mutters, ripping up the man’s pants. Hopefully the body will distract the Young enough to buy them some time, but first he’s got to get the clothes off.

Well, he tries to—the man’s wearing rather thick slacks. He manages a few centimeters and then Gunnhild pushes him out of the way, wielding a hunting knife.

“Crossbow!” Gunnhild says, carving off the rest of the pants.

Athelstan still doesn’t understand. “I do know how! But I don’t see how a crossbow’s going to stop another Y—”

“You don’t even have it!” she keeps yelling. “Why do you keep walking in these woods with no weapons, you don’t even protect your—”

Something hauls Athelstan backwards, just as Gunnhild stabs her hunting knife deep into the center of the man’s chest. She wraps what looks like wire around the handle, then tosses the other end of the spool to one of her teammates, who’s just now run up. The teammate yanks wire free of the spool, then turns and tosses it into the…the portal where the shoggoth went, which reopens just for a second.

Then both Gunnhild and the teammate run out of the woods, screaming in what Athelstan guesses is Old Norse as they go. Athelstan also gets picked up and dragged out of the woods, and a few seconds later, he’s dropped unceremoniously within the cottage’s permanent casting circle by Lagertha. Ragnar lopes in last, snarling a little as Gunnhild raises the protective wards so quickly that his tail gets singed.

He shakes himself human and plops down next to Athelstan, who now that he’s stopped moving, desperately needs to catch up on his breath. “You have a crossbow?” he asks.

Athelstan blinks and gasps.

Lagertha slides an arm around his back, supporting him, and Athelstan has the impression that she is glaring at Ragnar over the top of his head. “We can find it later.”

“You have that to shoot at things if you walk into the woods,” Gunnhild says, still fuming. “It is a good crossbow, and you attract lots of things that want to kill you, and all you ever have is your phone. Do you wish for death?”

“Ah— _no_ ,” Athelstan says, and then immediately regrets it, given how much his throat is burning. He coughs, distantly feeling Lagertha’s hand rubbing at his back, and tries to prop himself up on one arm. “No, I just—the data—so fresh, I just—why—”

Ragnar makes a small noise. It’s…not ashamed of itself, but he certainly sounds as if Gunnhild is responsible for pulling it out of him. “We did not want to go back into the jars.”

“You knew he was here,” Gunnhild says after a moment. She sounds calmer, but when Athelstan glances up, he sees that that is only because she’s found something far more infuriating than him to concentrate on. “We told you, the magic here is very delicate, and first you did not tell us about all of the other werewolves and then you did not tell us he was still _here_ —this is not just your business! It is not your vendetta if it could destroy all people!”

“We didn’t know he was _here_ ,” Lagertha says sharply. But defensively. “We knew he knew we were here. He…he is a magician, yes? He did things without being—he almost caught us again, and he was not actually here, it was—like his shadow—”

“Right, that. Could’ve been sending familiars, or golems, or something like that,” Athelstan mutters. He coughs a last time into his hand, then gets to his feet. He’s still shaky but the last few minutes are jumbling together into his head and the latest flash is being pulled away from the—the _rift_. “Wait, but the Young—”

Gunnhild snorts. “That is _not_ the Young coming through. That is just your magic acting up. Once his shoggoth eats him and draws the body away, it will settle down.”

Athelstan opens his mouth to say he knows the smell of a Young when he, well…and then squints at the trees. They look undisturbed, except for the shimmering streak just dancing in and out of their tops. Which it shouldn’t do if a Young is coming through—the Young should _already_ be through, in that case. So Gunnhild is right, his magic did just reach out and create some sort of illusion.

Wait. That isn’t his magic. He should be able to feel it, and he can’t.

“You needed a crossbow to feed his body to something?” Ragnar is saying to Gunnhild. “Why do you not just toss it in?”

“You do not _hand-feed_ a shoggoth,” Gunnhild says.

“You aren’t feeding him to it,” Athelstan says, horrified, as he stares at the dark bloody patch where the body had been.

Gunnhild turns slowly, still arguing with Ragnar, and then sees what he sees. Beside her, the other Patrol member is yanking up her sleeves to expose glowing forearm tattoos. Then Lagertha snarls viciously, whirling around, and they all see the grinning, semi-headless thing shuffling towards them. Pieces of skull are slotting clumsily in place as they watch.

“It cannot pass the circle,” Gunnhild says.

“He has my ax,” Ragnar observes, as he and Lagertha bundle Athelstan behind them. “Does the circle stop that?”

But if the rift isn’t Athelstan’s doing…Athelstan hurriedly reels off a revelation spell. He squeaks a little at the end, jostled by Lagertha’s push, and that happens to turn him so that he sees—his eyes widen and he grabs blindly at the nearest person, yanking at them as the dusty, limping, but very much intact man with what looks like a copy of the _Book of Eibon_ raises his hand over the pages.

“What—that was a _lich_ ,” Gunnhild hisses, finally turning to see the real sorcerer.

If it’s the spell Athelstan thinks the man is going to use, the protective circle isn’t going to do any good. Everything here is geared towards Shub-Niggurath, and that’s been reinforced tenfold because of the recent incursions. So if the man calls on powers amicable to Yog-Sothoth instead—

Athelstan yanks his pants down. He pulls hard enough to drop himself to his knees, which hurts—he didn’t land evenly—but he ignores that in favor of tearing his shirt off. He’s obviously not going to orgasm in time but he had sex recently enough that he thinks he can just rely on a bit of blood. Which he has all over his face—he scrubs hard at his nose, as the man starts chanting, and then someone grabs his wrists.

“You can’t I need to,” he snaps.

Lagertha stares breathlessly at him. “ _What_ ,” she says. “You need _what_.”

“I—” There’s no time so he nods at her mouth.

She seems to get it, and kisses him, and he drags her over a little so he can still see the man. The stone under their feet is starting to warp, but then he smooths it out. But it’s hard, his opponent has a lot of power and is still working up to it, and he can already feel the strain at the edges of the circle. Part of it flares dangerously yellow, almost reaching his foot, and he nearly jerks out of Lagertha’s arms.

A pair of hands at his back catches him, pushing him back. Ragnar, he thinks, pressing warmly up against him and he can feel himself sinking into the magic, pulling it up all around him, and he thinks it might just be enough.

Which is when the man turns the page and everything starts to go crooked. Athelstan can hear Gunnhild shouting in Norwegian, and behind him Ragnar’s muscles are twisting, the man’s shifting into a wolf, and—

—and then Ecbert steps out from a portal behind the man and, beaming, throws a tattered yellow cloth over the man’s head. “Athelstan, my boy!” he booms, as the moon in the sky doubles and then goes back to one, as despairing moans echo across the deceptively placid stillness of Lake Hali, as the form under the cloth _writhes_ and then abruptly collapses. “There you are! Do you have _any_ idea what you’ve done?”

In all honesty, Athelstan has only one answer for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shoggoth is subject to numerous interpretations depending on how you look at the Cthulhu Mythos, but generally it's a huge, wormlike, horrifying creature employed by people who are looking to eventually call up a cosmic tentacle alien but who haven't gotten around to it yet.
> 
> Lichs are Lovecraft's take on zombies. They're a lot more like mummies (without the exotic trappings) than Romero zombies.


	11. Chapter 11

“Well, as it happens, I personally knew Aelle. We were in the same class together at Brichester—mind you, it was a small class and you really couldn’t help but know each other,” Ecbert rattles off as he briskly pokes at the puddled yellow cloth with a long, ornately-carved stick. When the edges fold under, the center of the cloth briefly puffs up, its furrows and bulges forming strange, humanlike faces of contorted agony. “Forced socialization with those who the University deemed your peers, so to speak. We’ve vastly improved our screening tests since then, of course.”

“Screening tests,” Ragnar says, sounding half-interested and half-wary. He and Lagertha are still within the casting circle, though they’ve shifted human and have relaxed enough that they’re sitting on the ground. “For—”

“I do not care about your screening tests,” Gunnhild states. She, on the other hand, stormed out of the circle the moment Athelstan got the wards down and has been glowering at Ecbert ever since. “What I care about is—”

“That I made an unauthorized adjustment to the geometry of space-time, popped over here, and disciplined a man I fully admit to be ashamed to call a Brichester alum for violating our nondisclosure policies without so much as a visa application?” Ecbert says cheerfully. The faces in the cloth rear up enough that they are starting to show necks. He drops his gaze, mouth flattening, and then takes a two-handed swing at them. They immediately drop into non-animated wrinkles. “I completely understand. If it had happened to me, I would be _furious_.”

Athelstan bites his lip and glances at Gunnhild, who is clenching her fists against her waist. “Ecber—that is, _Dean_ Ecbert,” he mutters. “I’m not sure this is the right—”

“ _However_ ,” Ecbert says, flipping the cane around and nimbly tucking it under his arm. He straightens up with his free hand lifted to forestall any other comments. “By virtue of my position, and thank you, Athelstan, for reminding me, I must point out that the manner by which Aelle went about persecuting these _blameless_ werewolves—”

Ragnar and Lagertha blink hard.

“—clearly and flagrantly violates not only Brichester’s own code of conduct, but also the Exham Pact, which for the benefit of those of us who are newcomers to this, _imposes_ a positive obligation on its signatories to take _immediate_ action against any such global crimes,” Ecbert finishes. He pauses, hand still raised, and then sweeps it low to indicate Gunnhild may now speak.

Gunnhild does not speak. Instead she regards Ecbert with a level, narrow-eyed, unflinching gaze that is every match to the faint but unwaveringly confident smile on his face. Neither of them move for _minutes_.

“Ah.” Ragnar ducks his head, then raises it when he realizes that neither of them are looking over at him. He pauses, then apparently decides they’re still paying attention. “I would like to ask a question, before we start fighting again.”

“Oh, we are not fighting,” Gunnhild says slowly. She uncurls the hand she has jammed against her hip, and even though there’s nothing visible at her waist, they all hear the distinct noise of metal scraping against metal. She looks down, flexing her fingers as if they’re cramped from clutching at an invisible tool, and then looks back up at Ecbert. “We respect the Pact. You were first to him, he is yours.”

“Thank you,” Ecbert says warmly. “I truly appreciate it. And rest assured, Brichester’s resources are at your disposal for any—”

“I will notify the rest of the Shield that you take responsibility for the violations,” Gunnhild says as she starts to turn away. She gestures calmly to her fellow Patrol member, who is carefully stepping down the casting circle. “They will send you what we have on this man, and you will file the concluding reports with Carcosa. _All_ the reports.”

Ecbert pauses, then gives Gunnhild a half-admiring, half-annoyed smile. She doesn’t bother to turn around, but just stalks off, taking her Patrol teammate with her. They go over to the truck still parked on the far side of the cottage and appear to start making calls.

“Should you have done that?” Athelstan can’t help asking.

“Done…oh, it’s all right, if they’re resorting to bureaucratic retaliation, they _can’t_ break off relations. They’re invested now, Athelstan,” Ecbert says, still in that absurdly cheerful voice. He glances down, then gives the yellow cloth a last poke with his wand. Then reaches into his pocket, only to frown as his hand comes back out with nothing in it. “The last thing they want to do is never talk to me again, because then they can’t lodge complaints that I will…hmmm. I could have sworn…do you happen to have any sealing matches on you?”

Ragnar raises his hand. “I still have a question.”

“Hmmmm?” Ecbert says, lifting his head, a mild expression that Athelstan knows far too well on his face. Then he breaks into a broad smile. “And you must be the Lothbroks! Athelstan’s told me all about you.”

Lagertha and Ragnar both look deeply skeptical, even before Athelstan lets out a half-hearted noise of protest. “He has not known us for that long,” Ragnar points out.

“Well, but clearly you’ve made fast acquaintances if he’s twisting the angles that much for you,” Ecbert says sunnily. His voice drops. “ _Very_ fast. I’m impressed, Athelstan.”

Ragnar smiles too. Nearly all of his teeth are showing, back to the molars. “You are this mentor of his? Who talks about who he should date?”

“Also the _Dean_ of Brichester University,” Athelstan hurriedly breaks in. Then he recalls that this doesn’t mean that much to either werewolf. “The position comes with a lot of power and magic that just the Dean gets—”

“So I gathered, from how he crossed an ocean to strike down another sorcerer,” Lagertha says, tone rather flat and unimpressed. Then she turns to Ecbert. “If this man was a student of yours—” 

“A classmate, and very, very briefly, a fellow adjunct professor. _Not_ a student of mine, and when I had the ability to do so, I revoked his degree nearly fifteen years ago,” Ecbert says. His eyes are still twinkling, but it’s a bit like glitter over a bottomless pit leading to Azathoth. “This unfortunately was before my time, when our processes for enforcement were rather slow. So if your question is why did we not stop him before he took you on—”

Ragnar waves a dismissive hand. “We did not know about his school, and if we had, we still wouldn’t have waited for you to try and kill him. My question is whether you are here to make Athelstan leave.”

Ecbert blinks hard. “ _Not_ about what I should do for you to make up for your suffering, or if I have nefarious plans for you?”

“I think this might go better over some tea,” Athelstan blurts out, and then promptly flushes to the point he’s shocked he doesn’t pass out, from having all that blood in his face.

Everyone appears to ignore him. “We can discuss that next,” Ragnar says, in an agreeable enough tone. “But first he keeps saying he has to leave because he can open doors to these…aliens. But I thought this place has doors to the aliens anyway.”

“It does, and that’s why he’s on sabbatical here, because the odd door here and there doesn’t really move the needle and if it does, there are locals who can deal with it,” Ecbert nods. “Although there is a _slight_ difference between an extra offspring of the Goat and an off-shoot of Yog-Sothoth…”

“Did the exchange students ever truly matter?” Lagertha asks.

What this goes to demonstrate, a small part of Athelstan notes, is that he’s drastically underestimated werewolf hearing. And also the cottage’s wards didn’t take that into account either, even though he specifically remembers the Elder Patrol’s materials on it mentioning that it was rated to mask magical disruptions up to grade five and that _should_ include sound.

“Of _course_ they matter. Endowments alone don’t pay for a campus that can service a complete first edition of the _Necronomicon_ ,” Ecbert says. His voice rises briefly in outrage before settling down. “But what matters more is the quality of the graduate we produce, and Athelstan, I’ll have you understand, is _outstanding_.”

“We are not arguing,” Ragnar says.

Ecbert, clearly about to launch into a longer monologue, pauses. “No?”

“No. We like him. We like him very much,” Lagertha says. She lets Ecbert smile at her, while Ragnar shoots Athelstan a half-furtive, half-curious look over her head. “That is why we would like to know what you did to make him think everyone wants him only for his magic.”

“Wait,” Athelstan says, starting up.

“I thought we weren’t fighting,” Ecbert says plaintively, staring at Lagertha.

The way that he’s looking at her…Athelstan stops mid-protest, incredulous. Lagertha sees it too, because she lifts her chin, smiling a little, and then allows her canines to show. “We would like _not_ to. But…”

“Ecbert didn’t have anything to do with it,” Athelstan snaps, finally getting hold of himself. “He had to tell me to get it under control because he’s the dean of the school, he can’t let me on campus if I’m going to endanger everyone else. And I agreed, because I don’t want to do that either, and I’m not—I came here for a _reason_. I didn’t come here to—to just be that one interesting freak show everyone stares at! I didn’t really have sex with other people for the same reason, because this is—this is novel for them, but this is normal for me—well, it’ll have to be normal for me now, and I just—all I want is to get used to it! That’s what I wanted to do!”

They all look blankly at him, as if he’s not making any sense. Athelstan exhales, then grimaces and glances around to see if he’s done any—and then he thinks that it doesn’t really matter. There are specialists around here, and they’ll fix it, and in the meantime, he doesn’t really want to talk to any of them right now.

He probably can’t go into the cottage either, not with how upset he feels. He might as well have _not_ had any sex, for all the good that’s done.

“Athelstan.” Gunnhild’s come back, and is looking over everything with the air of a tired schoolteacher at the end of the day. “You know that you are—”

“Yes,” he says. He tries to control his tone, since she at least doesn’t deserve it. “If I go…over there, and sit behind that tree, is anything going to happen to me?”

Gunnhild considers the tree. “Shub-Niggurath should not come, and neither should her Young. You would know better than me about the Hounds or Yog-Sothoth. And I do not know about any were—”

“Nothing will happen,” Ragnar says. There’s a pause and Gunnhild frowns as if Ragnar’s making one of those sheepish faces at her. “We are done. Truly.”

“Thank you,” Athelstan says, and walks towards the tree.

* * *

The tree Athelstan’s sitting under is far enough from the cottage that whenever his magic slips out, the ripples in reality don’t reach the building. It’s still close enough that he can see the others, though he can’t see enough of their faces to know when they’re speaking to each other and when they’re just glaring. However, he can tell when they’re trying to look at him.

He rolls back behind the tree, then lets his head fall against the trunk and sighs. Puts his hand in his lap, then pulls it back up to rub at the side of his face. Beating off probably won’t settle things down, since honestly, sex isn’t what’s bothering him.

“All right,” he mutters to himself. “What _are_ you doing here, Athelstan?”

Alienating his dissertation adviser, who also happens to be the head of his University, when there are less than ten worldwide who even acknowledge eldritch studies, let alone know how to accommodate someone who’s essentially a walking case study. And making himself unpleasant to two people who have expressed interest in a relationship with him, despite knowing about the side-effects of having sex with him.

On the other hand, they all had been acting _exactly_ like the type of Brichester personality he’d been avoiding since before he went to Averoigne: self-centered and decisive mostly because they didn’t expect any pushback from him. 

Ecbert he’s known for a while, and he knows the man can be that way. He even understands, given what a Dean of Brichester has to deal with, but he had honestly thought that the two of them had a different relationship. Perhaps that’s naïve of him. At the end of the day, Ecbert needs to look out for the University, and considering how they’d had to deal with Aelle—and what Aelle had managed to do before anyone caught up to him—Athelstan can’t judge the man too harshly. He’s just…surprised. 

“Well, I know now,” he mutters to himself.

The Lothbroks are a little different. 

All right, if he’s being honest with himself, they’re very different. He doesn’t need to continue to deal with them. If Ecbert doesn’t think he’s ready to come back to campus, then he can always grovel to Gunnhild and try to get the Patrol to rehome him elsewhere in the preserve. But…as irritated as he is with them, the thought of walking away also leaves him feeling regretful.

They’re interesting too. And finding them interesting makes him feel a little guilty, since it’s coming at least a little out of his ignorance about werewolves. Also the part of it that’s _not_ about them being werewolves is probably about how oddly comfortable they are with his issues, compared to most people. Either way he’s rather hypocritical. And he should really make up his mind what he’s going to do about that, if he’s going to lean into it or if he’s just going to…he thinks of the word ‘run’ and then shies from it. Then brings it up again, on purpose, and makes himself think through it.

In a bizarre way, he had an easier time making choices when he was just someone who knew a lot about very obscure areas that no one really respected. These days he knows a lot about obscure areas that people really need to respect or else monsters from other dimensions invade. 

It’s a stupid problem, he thinks, and he’s being a coward. He can’t just sit behind this tree forever, he knows that—even if a small part of him just hopes the decision will be taken out of his hands. But then, that’s what had gotten him into trouble in Averoigne. He can’t just sit around waiting for a sign.

Athelstan rolls out from behind the tree, then falls backward, a scream catching in his throat, as a wide-eyed Ragnar lunges forward and covers his mouth. “Don’t! I am not going to hurt you and Lagertha’s distracting him for now but he keeps angering Gunnhild,” the man hisses at Athelstan. Then he ducks at something, his limbs folding in around them. “Don’t _kill_ me either. Please?”

After a moment, Athelstan gets himself under control. He reaches up, and when Ragnar doesn’t stop him, pulls the other man’s hand off his mouth. “She’s distracting who? Ecbert?”

“Is he really your mentor?” Ragnar says, lips twisting.

“Adviser, for my dissertation,” Athelstan says. He pushes himself up on one elbow. “Well, and he’s sort of a mentor. Was. I’m not really sure right now. But he _is_ a powerful man.”

Ragnar rolls his eyes and seems about to comment on that, but then shakes himself. He shifts back, squatting with his feet on either side of Athelstan’s waist. “I think we did not explain what we meant,” he says, the words coming a little slowly. 

“I think you did,” Athelstan says. Then stops, alarmed at himself. He bites his lip and waits, but…Ragnar doesn’t do anything.

Just purses his lips. He wants to say something, and starts a few times, only to abruptly shut his mouth. Finally he sighs. “What happened?”

Athelstan blinks. “Wh—”

“In Averoigne,” Ragnar says. Then awkwardly lifts one hand and waves it between them. “Don’t tell me, or tell me. You know I can’t make you. I would like to know, and not…only because it is interesting, or because you are interesting. But this is up to you.”

They look at each other. Ragnar doesn’t appear to need to blink, Athelstan notes, and wonders whether this is characteristic of all weres, or just ones who shift into predators. The stare is consistent even when Athelstan starts to fidget and to glance around them.

“You can’t make—” Athelstan starts.

“You can call up Hounds of Tindalos,” Ragnar points out.

“Well, not if you catch me off-guard!” Athelstan says.

Ragnar presses his lips together. For a second he almost looks amused, and then he’s serious again. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to get to know you. I like you. I…do not like very many people.”

“That can’t be true,” Athelstan says, and then flushes a little as Ragnar raises one brow. “You’re a—that is, ah.”

“An alpha?” Ragnar says, looking very tolerant about Athelstan’s ignorance. The flesh around his left eye and left side of his mouth twitches, and something about it feels slightly bitter. “Yes. Also one who was in a jar for twenty years. You do not meet many people that way.”

“Oh, of course,” Athelstan says lamely.

Ragnar’s other brow rises. Then he glances down. He shifts to lean his wrists on his knees, his hands hanging down, and looks back up. “I did not like very many people even before that. It is hard to, as an alpha. You have to…keep order, and make people think of what is better for everyone, and not just for themselves, which they do not like, even if you are right. And you kill a lot of people. You don’t meet many _new_ people that way.”

Athelstan opens his mouth, and then stops himself this time before he says anything foolish. 

“This was…interesting,” Ragnar goes on after a second, looking absently around them. “Coming here, we needed to anyway, to make sure what happened to us would be the end of it. But also it was like starting over, a little, just me and Lagertha. I thought I was dying, when I was turned into this—this salt.”

“So this was a second chance,” Athelstan says.

Asks, really, and Ragnar catches the lilt and shrugs one shoulder. “Eh, it was more to leave our pack—our old pack—alone. We weren’t really _their_ alphas any more, but you can’t just…tell us not to be alive. You can’t have what was twenty years ago—you have to live right now. And so it was interesting, thinking…what if this time, we don’t start a pack?”

“But don’t werewolves—isn’t that what you do?”

Ragnar grimaces. “Yes and…I am not sure about the words in English. There is ‘pack’ like…who you live with and like, and there is ‘pack’ like…like who you must look after, and claim when someone causes trouble for them. One is much more complicated than the other.”

“I…think I see,” Athelstan says slowly. And he does, even if it’s not in a way he could probably articulate to someone else. But the idea of things you like and things you put up with because you feel responsible, he can grasp that. “But I doubt you thought Cthulhic entities would be part of your life.”

“But new things are good,” Ragnar says, suddenly flashing Athelstan a smile. It’s warm and friendly, even with the amount of teeth he’s showing, and it doesn’t seem calculated at all. “Even if they can kill me, I will still learn something.”

“That’s…” _a very Brichester way of looking at it_ , Athelstan almost says. 

Instead he trails off. Ragnar looks at him for another second, searching for something, and then settles back. The man hasn’t found it, and seems…disappointed, but not at Athelstan.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Ragnar says, and then moves as if he’s going to get up.

“I accidentally resurrected and then killed a sorcerer connected with the Tsathoggua cult,” Athelstan blurts out.

Ragnar pauses. Then turns back and settles in, eyes sparking with interest. “Does this Sa-do-qua have tentacles?”

“Ah, no, it doesn’t. Not all of the Cthulhic entities do, and anyway, it’s still a matter of some debate whether Tsathoggua really can be classified as one or if it’s actually a pseudo-Great Old One with true origins in Saturn—anyway,” Athelstan says, realizing that he’s rambling. “It’s more like a furry toad, at least to human eyes. And thankfully, I didn’t encounter Tsathoggua itself, just a follower, although admittedly one who was hundreds of years old and who had a laboratory full of arcane substances and in the middle of all of it I spilled some on myself, hence the magical powers.”

“What was it?” Ragnar says. He pauses, then sees Athelstan isn’t following. “What you were in the middle of—why were you in this lab?”

“Oh, well, he needed a virgin sacrifice and, well, I was. At the time,” Athelstan says, flushing. “Obviously not now, and—anyway, since he’d just resurrected, he didn’t know what my phone was, so even though I was restrained, I was able to get it out and disrupt his spells, but I was in a bit of a hurry because—”

“Why did he know you were a virgin?” Ragnar says, a little sharply.

Athelstan loses his train of thought and in the middle of trying to find it again, answers honestly: “Because that actually disqualifies you from being able to access some _other_ books, including the ones I went there to look up for my research, and I was very, well, disappointed about it and that’s how his spirit sort of talked me into resurrecting him in the first place. I, well, wasn’t thinking clearly. Which I _did_ fix, but not before…making sure that now I have to have sex. As you know. So I don’t, ah, enable those sorts of things.”

For a long stretch of seconds, Ragnar simply looks at Athelstan. He doesn’t appear to be angry, like he’d almost been a moment ago, or disgusted. He just seems to be…digesting.

Then he abruptly puts his hand up and rubs it over his face. He runs it along the shaved part of his scalp, then brings it back to pinch and pull at his nose. Finally, he looks back at Athelstan. 

“You said it is very easy to go insane studying the things you study, and I thought this was because of the aliens with tentacles, but now it sounds it is because of people,” he mutters. His fingers flutter, cutting off Athelstan’s comment, and he drops his hand from his face. They’re barely inches apart. “Athelstan. I like you. Lagertha likes you. I say you are interesting because you are, and I think my English is not using that word the way I want to mean it. Or maybe it’s because we are werewolves, because when we like something—this is what we feel, and we know it because we feel it. I like talking to you, and I like…you like talking to me, I think, and I like that. Also, I like sex with you. I don’t really care about all these other crazy things that sex means with your studies, and I wish—but if that is what it means to you—”

“It’s not. I mean,” Athelstan starts, and then stops himself. Then puts his hands down as if to get up, only to have Ragnar go tense and alert on him. He grimaces almost before Ragnar does, and waves his hand as the other man makes a visible effort to relax. “I didn’t go into this _thinking_ I’d end up having to regulate my sex life as part of—I didn’t even think that would be a factor. And I—honestly, I like you too. Both of you.”

Ragnar blinks hard. Then settles back, grinning, the warm, uninhibited one that makes the corners of Athelstan’s own mouth twitch.

“I just…I do want to make sure I don’t repeat my mistakes, and I think it’s just honestly hard to know what those were. I mean, I wouldn’t have ended up in that lab if I hadn’t been a virgin, but on the other hand, if I _hadn’t_ been a virgin, I wouldn’t have been able to invoke that particular part of the _Book of Eibon_ and stop him—”

“Do you think it could just be sex?” Ragnar asks. Then dips his head a little. “I know it is also magic, I am not forgetting that. But…I am a werewolf, and when I turn into a wolf, this is magic, but also, this is just what I do.”

“I…” Athelstan starts, before letting his voice trail off. He stares absently at Ragnar’s tattooed neck. “Well, of course, that actually is the goal, since I don’t really want to live on a hotspot for my whole life. I’d like to get there eventually, but it’s obviously going to be a process.”

“Is this a process we can join?” Then, as Athelstan’s blushing over his yelp, Lagertha drops out of nowhere to sit next to Ragnar. Who elbows her, and then mutters in Norwegian as Lagertha looks Athelstan over. She seems slightly apologetic. “Do you want us to…cough first?”

So he can hear them, she means. “Oh, no, I mean, you’re werewolves and it would be unfair if I asked you to not act naturally, and anyway coughing probably won’t work if I’m reading,” Athelstan says. “I suppose I’ll get used to it.”

Both Lagertha and Ragnar go very still. Lagertha’s hand snaps onto Ragnar’s knee when he shifts slightly, and then Lagertha takes a deep breath. “It is not much to ask that we do not startle you,” she says. “You are one person, and you have good reasons for it. We are asking to live with you, and learn too, not to make you do everything for us.”

“Oh,” Athelstan says, dumbly.

“We do hear very well,” Lagertha says, with a rueful smile. “I understand what you mean about not repeating your mistakes. When you come back twenty years later and see what your children have done with what you left them—”

“They are fine,” Ragnar says, glancing at her.

She doesn’t look back but her stance softens; they both give off the air of this being a long-standing but still lively argument. 

“They are fine, but also, they have twenty years on us, and we cannot have those years back. They are lost and there is nothing we can do,” she says. She pauses to purse her lips, then puts her hand out so her fingertips just touch Athelstan’s knee. “But we now have this life, and I would like to…help. And learn, and if I cannot help, simply live. If you will allow it.”

“I…had to think about it,” Athelstan says after a long moment. Then immediately regrets it when he seems them both slump. He pushes himself up and catches at Lagertha’s wrist without thinking. “No, no, I _had_ to. I only just got back from Averoigne a month and a half ago, and I spent most of it in Brichester’s quarantine rooms till they could figure out exactly _what_ I could do, and then came here and we immediately started killing all these werewolves and I just haven’t had any time to _think_. And I don’t—I don’t do very well when I have to improvise.”

“I think you do all right,” Ragnar says. “You did kill—”

Lagertha hits him and he grunts. But he’s right. “But I don’t really know how I feel about that yet,” Athelstan amends. “I’m supposed to be an educator, not a…I know it’s necessary sometimes to kill and I don’t think I do it when it’s not necessary, or at least I try not to, but I didn’t go to Brichester for that.”

“Well, we can do the killing,” Ragnar offers. And grunts again, but this time, he swallows his discomfort at whatever Lagertha did to him. “We don’t mind, if you don’t.”

“You do need to work on that,” Lagertha reluctantly agrees. “I found the crossbow and you _should_ have that with you when you go out here.”

“Yes, I know, I forgot, I just thought I could get somewhere with the data and.” Athelstan stops himself. Looks at her, then at Ragnar, and then takes his own deep breath. “Well…how about this, we can try…dating. No commitment yet, not till you have a better idea of what could happen, and I really should get you some training materials from Brichester Security, actually.”

Ragnar beams at him. So does Lagertha, and just as brilliantly, even though she’s almost sitting on Ragnar’s thigh now to keep him from moving towards Athelstan. “That is fine. Your mentor said they would have information in the welcome packet too.”

The trees warp around them, then straighten out. “Welcome packet?” Athelstan asks, as calmly as he can manage.

“…yes,” Lagertha says. She and Ragnar haven’t run but they’re making an obvious effort to continue looking at him and not at the still-wobbly trees. “We want to understand you, Athelstan. So I asked your mentor, and he said the simple way to access the important resources would be to apply to the…Nontraditional Student track, he called it?”

“Oh. Right.” Athelstan gets up. “Yes, that makes sense. I—I’m sorry, I’m not running away from you, I really do want to date, I just—need to talk to Ecbert. Very badly. I—sorry, be right back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ecbert was always one of my favorite characters, even if his storylines could've been drastically edited down so they didn't drag on the episodes so much. It's sort of a shame they didn't ever truly pit him against Lagertha, or any Viking character that could've really given him a run for his money (Ragnar aside, and that was really more to just set up the intellectual triangle with Athelstan).
> 
> Exham is a reference to Lovecraft's _The Rats in the Walls_ , which involved a multidisciplinary scientific investigation of some antediluvian ruins discovered under an English castle.
> 
> Universities in the Cthulhu Mythos seem to have a very high turnover in faculty who go mad or attempt to call up a shoggoth or get in the way of someone who is doing that, so as Dean, Ecbert prioritizes hanging onto the ones who think they're going to last more than one session with the _Necronomicon_ (which is an evil and possibly sentient ancient book on everything you wanted to know about cosmic tentacle aliens).


	12. Chapter 12

Ecbert is transparently unashamed. “Well, I’m hardly going to tell two alpha werewolves with their level of field experience to go join the freshers, Athelstan. That’d be truly shooting our retention rate in the foot.”

“You’re not supposed to recruit them at all!” Athelstan shouts. “They’re not deposits!”

“Of _course_ not, I wasn’t going to charge them anything, aside from the usual Security fee and you know I can’t waive that, that’s direct tithe to the Yellow Sign,” Ecbert says tartly. “Tuition will be covered by an appropriate scholarship, while for housing I imagine it’ll be easier to simply upgrade you to a family unit.”

The fact that Athelstan is bringing himself to shout at the man primarily responsible for his career, not only at Brichester but at nearly anywhere else in the world who might accept someone with his background—universities in the Cthulhic League rely very heavily on personal assessments of mental health—is shocking enough. But what’s coming out of Ecbert’s mouth just leaves Athelstan gaping like a fish.

“Perhaps we should discuss this indoors,” Ecbert sighs.

Gunnhild and the rest of the Elder Patrol, who have all stopped what they were doing at the casting circle to watch, look neutral about this. However, they do continue to look, even as Ecbert closes the cottage door behind Athelstan.

“Why do you think I sent you over to Norway, Athelstan?” Ecbert asks before Athelstan has a chance to say anything.

“I was wreaking havoc on campus,” Athelstan says, finally recovering. “And if this was part of a plot to stabilize me—”

“Well, _of course_ it was,” Ecbert says, exasperated. “Did you rather I threw you out into the world, waited till you’d gone as off-course as Aelle and then called down the auditors on you? I _care_ about you, Athelstan. I want you sane and healthy and happy.”

Which unfortunately sends Athelstan back to doing his best suffocating-fish impression. And the most irritating part of it is that he really should not be so surprised. He’s seen Ecbert do this a thousand times to other people, and honestly, has even gone to the man on occasion to ask for help in that way. He’s one of many doctoral students Ecbert’s had over the years and there is no real reason why he should be an exception.

“Stop twisting reality for a second and sit down, Athelstan,” Ecbert sighs. He does so himself, making stability signs in the air with one hand as he pulls out the now fully-inanimate chair with the other. He makes himself comfortable, then folds his hands over his knee and waits for Athelstan to join him at the kitchen table. “Now, I have no doubt that you’re currently feeling betrayed at the fact that I’ve manipulated you for your own long-term well-being—”

“You have to have expected that,” Athelstan snaps, taking his seat.

For that he gets a brief look of surprise, possibly more on the impressed side than not. “I’ll admit, I didn’t count on you being quite this invested, given it’s only been a few days and you’re normally a very methodical type,” Ecbert says. “But I will take that as a good sign. I thought I’d have to smuggle those two to Brichester to get you to admit that Averoigne’s left you horribly isolated and lonely.”

Athelstan opens his mouth, closes it, and then tries again. “I—had three separate psych screens—”

“And in every one of them you were manfully doing your best to reassure us that you weren’t going to be a burden on our systems, and would bother the people trying to help you as little as possible,” Ecbert says. Pauses and raises an eyebrow. “Yes? You read the reports too, I assume?”

“Well, Brichester…” Athelstan starts, and fails.

“Exactly. Now, I’ve done my best to bring the University around to the modern idea that perhaps it’s better to _support_ our best minds through their crises rather than to stand by and wring our hands in horror at their slow descent into madness, but as you know, changing customs takes time. And changing _British_ customs.” Ecbert snorts and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. It comes near the tabletop and he glances down. Then splays his hand a little above the wood, and when Athelstan manages to keep things under control, puts it down and leans towards Athelstan. “You’re one of the best students I’ve had in quite a while, and I fully admit I have plans for you, Athelstan. We need people with your enduring sense of humanity, especially since you’ve more than proved that will survive contact with the eldritch side of human nature, as well as the Great Old Ones. We need you in the faculty, _not_ out in the wilderness in some remote hermitage. And that is why I don’t feel a speck of guilt. If you need those two, you need those two.”

“Well, am I not going to be able to make up my own mind?” Athelstan says. “Or are they?”

“Am I brainwashing any of you?” Ecbert ripostes, brows raised. “And you and I both know that’s possible. But no, because we need _you_ , not your lobotomized doppelganger.”

But if that had been the goal, couldn’t have Ecbert just told him? And Athelstan almost asks that, only to have the answer come to him as the words are coming up his throat: no, because Athelstan wouldn’t have believed him back then. Since that wasn’t actually the problem Athelstan had wanted to fix—had thought needed to be fixed. So this probably was the most effective way Ecbert could get what he wanted, as grating as it is.

Which does raise another thought in Athelstan’s head. “You do realize that now I’m highly motivated to make sure they don’t get dragged into any Brichester nonsense,” he points out. “Starting with getting their offer letters negotiated.”

“My dear boy,” Ecbert says, breaking out into a broad enough smile that Athelstan knows this was _exactly_ what the man had wanted, even earlier than expected. “That’s why you’re under no circumstances coming back to campus till your sabbatical has fully run. We’ll defer their start for a year and send you to America first.”

“Miskatonic?” Athelstan says, startled.

“Beacon Hills,” Ecbert says. “The Americans just opened an outpost there to study a fascinating development in post-Cthulhic effects on native entities, namely, a Nemeton, and they even have resident werewolves! And they’re much less insular on the West Coast, so I hear. I think it’s the perfect environment for you all to get to know each other better, and yes, in the meantime, we’ll negotiate.”

* * *

“I am not sure that I _like_ this adviser of yours,” Lagertha says later, as she and Ragnar poke around in the cottage stove.

“He likes you, I think. He seemed very happy at the thought of going over scholarships with you,” Ragnar says, gently bumping his hip into Lagertha as she gives his bent back a narrow-eyed look. He peers into the stove, then suddenly darts his arm into its depths. “Anyway—” he grunts and scrabbles around, then slaps at something inside the stove “—we are going to America, so he will have to wait.”

“We are going to America _because_ he would like us to do something,” Lagertha corrects him.

“I know, but at least I know what he’s going for now and Miskatonic’s got a very strong Security team so I don’t think even Ecbert would be showing up unannounced,” Athelstan mutters as he clicks through folder after folder on his laptop. He’s not disorganized—you really can’t be, when you’re dealing with languages that gradually warp files over time—but for some reason he can’t find his old application paperwork. “Ecbert’s a little—well, more than a little bit of an acquired taste, but I’m not about to let him talk you into anything you don’t want to do. I’m going to send you my final acceptance letter, and then I can poke around the graduate subreddit, and—”

Something warm and slightly yielding settles into Athelstan’s side. When he startles, Lagertha props his laptop up till he can recover, and then snuggles into his shoulder. “I called our lawyer,” she says. Now that he’s got the laptop, she pulls her hand back to her lap, but leaves its knuckles bumping his thigh. “He is not very familiar with the Great Old Ones, but he knows a good deal about contracts with untrustworthy people in our world. So I think between you and Floki, we will be fine.”

“Oh, that’s good—another pair of eyes will help. And come to think of it, I am sort of friends with the librarian for our law school, and he’s a little bit out of sorts with Ecbert right now,” Athelstan says, still half-distracted by the tickle of her hair sliding past his neck. “I don’t want this to put you off right at the start.”

“Athelstan,” Lagertha says, voice a low push from the throat that makes him look at her.

He freezes, then swallows hard as her face rises towards him—and then Ragnar yelps and crashes to the floor.

Athelstan twists around, feeling rather than seeing Lagertha leap up onto the back of the couch, and then hisses through his teeth. Then, very carefully, he puts the ceiling angles back into the right reality.

“I don’t— _think_ it is evil, or trying to kill me,” Ragnar says cheerfully, as if they hadn’t all briefly heard an extradimensional growl. He’s got something small and pale trying to wiggle out from between his fingers, which have it trapped against the floor.

Lagertha sighs. Then hops silently off the couch and steps over him on her way to the stove. She peeks inside, then begins to stack wood in it. In the meantime, Ragnar carefully pivots his hips to get his feet under himself before he pries whatever it is off the floor. He cups his hands around it as if it could shatter at any second.

“This one, right?” he says, holding it towards Athelstan.

Athelstan opens his mouth to ask what he means, only to temporarily forget how to speak when a fuzzy strip worms past Ragnar’s thumb and waves wildly in the air. “The _Cladonia_! Oh—hold onto it, let me just get the case and stun it properly and—”

Ragnar nods vigorously, then amiably scoots out of the way as Athelstan trips over himself to get off the couch and past the man and into the bedroom to retrieve his tools. One sample, at least—even if he’s leaving at the end of the week, that’s not a bad showing at all.

When he comes back, Ragnar still has the lichen. It takes a little maneuvering to get it to go into the bag at the same time that Athelstan can tase it, and not catch Ragnar, but they manage it. By then Lagertha has a fire started in the stove and is heating up a kettle of water. “Tea,” she says, and lifts an eyebrow to match the one Ragnar lifts at her. “ _After_ you wash your hands. I do not think the English take dirt in theirs.”

Grinning, Ragnar wanders over to the sink, dropping a kiss on the back of her neck on the way, and takes care of that. The two of them are just very comfortable around each other, Athelstan thinks as he puts the case away.

“I think we have to wait on the sex.” Ragnar reappears next to Athelstan. He casually grabs the case as it slips out of Athelstan’s hand and shoves it into the bag Athelstan had been trying to put it in, then curls up almost like Lagertha had just done. Although as he’s rather larger, his legs end up sprawling under Athelstan’s knees rather than sliding alongside them. “Yes?”

“I—yes,” Athelstan says, watching Ragnar’s face. The man is joking, clearly, and he still seems relaxed—but there had been a slight gleam of hope in his eyes. “If only till we get out of here. I think if Gunnhild has to repair the protective overlay on this cottage one more time, she’ll fly me to America herself.”

Ragnar lets out a sigh of disappointment, exaggerating it to show he’s not serious, and continues to lean into Athelstan. Lagertha asks something in Norwegian and he calls back, then shifts his arm so it’s not quite so far into Athelstan’s side. Then his eyes flick into Athelstan’s lap.

“Should I not?” he says, now quite serious. He pauses, then starts to pull back.

Before Athelstan can help himself, he hooks his hand around Ragnar’s elbow. Ragnar stops, then settles back against him, _very_ happy. It still hardly makes any sense to Athelstan, to be honest: why the two of them seem so easily pleased with what he does, why they’re making accommodations for him, why they don’t _mind_ when he loses control. But he likes it. He can admit that, freely.

“But we can’t have sex,” he says, and Ragnar lets out a comfortable laugh.

“Then that is not my problem,” Ragnar says, with another glance at Athelstan’s crotch.

Then he turns, as Lagertha comes up with three steaming cups of tea. She hands Athelstan his and deposits the two others on the end-table, then slaps Ragnar’s buttock. He snarls at her, briefly showing his fangs, and she rolls her eyes as she climbs onto him so that they’re both twined up against Athelstan’s side.

“This will be useful,” she says, tossing something into Athelstan’s lap before she fully lies down.

Ragnar snorts. “Too small.”

“Well, that is the _point_ ,” she says, as Athelstan, blushing, picks up the cock cage. “Also, you broke the only other thing he had.”

“Did he?” Athelstan mutters, not really remembering. “Oh, we’ll have to…do I need to buy another one?”

The pair of them are quiet. A little too much so, and when he looks over, they…don’t exactly start, but their expressions shift. Trying to plaster nonchalance over something considerably more intense.

They’re trying. This—makes Athelstan’s cheeks burn, and he ducks into his tea for a sip to give himself some time. Not to avoid thinking about it, but…it’s new, realizing that he likes that. Would like more of that.

“If you know something that’d work better,” he says, lowering his cup and lifting the cock cage. “These were all recommendations from the—the other—anyway, I’m not particularly attached to them. If there’s something you’d like…”

Lagertha moves her hand. Pauses, as he shifts to look at her, and then holds it out. He puts the cage in her hand and she examines it for a second, then twists against Ragnar so that his head slides from Athelstan’s shoulder to the crook of Athelstan’s arm. Ragnar starts to say something, then sighs in resignation as Lagertha flips the cage open with her fingers.

“It will do for now,” she says. She leans up and nibbles at Ragnar’s jawline as she reaches into his pants. “But we should ask Floki about this too.”

“Your lawyer?” Athelstan says, blinking.

“He knows a lot of things,” Ragnar mutters. His body arches as Lagertha slides the cage around his cock, moving his head off Athelstan’s elbow. 

Athelstan lifts the arm without thinking and Ragnar’s head plops onto his thigh. Ragnar stares up at him, eyes very blue, very intent, and when Athelstan moves his arm back, Ragnar twitches a little. It’s sharper than just the man settling down, with intent to it—Athelstan freezes and a flicker of disappointment goes through Ragnar’s eyes. That wasn’t what the man wanted, Athelstan to…stop? But Athelstan wasn’t doing…

He looks down Ragnar’s torso, to where Lagertha has the cage on but unfastened. She’s watching him too, with the same sort of uncertain expectation. They want him to do something, but he doesn’t think they’re going to tell him.

This is going to be awkward, Athelstan is thinking, when something draws his eye back up. Ragnar hooks his chin up a little, eyes briefly sliding off Athelstan’s face, and Athelstan’s caught by the way the black lines of the tattoo ripple down Ragnar’s…he touches one with his fingertip and Ragnar trembles very slightly. Then relaxes, head tipping all the way back, as Athelstan cautiously lets his hand curve over the man’s bared throat.

“I heard somewhere, to tattoo a werewolf, you have to use a blowtorch,” Athelstan says. A clicking noise makes him look down again, and he just glimpses the fastened cage before Lagertha sprawls back over Ragnar, hiding that from view.

“That is one way,” Lagertha says. She folds her hands over Ragnar’s breastbone and rests her chin on the knuckles. “But you can’t do very good detail with that way. And we do not have tattoos without meaning, when it is so hard to have them stay on us.”

“I didn’t think werewolves could manage piercings either, with your healing,” Athelstan says, and starts to lift his hand.

Then he stops himself, but Lagertha smiles and puts her head to the side, and he supposes that’s permission so he reaches out and rubs her earlobe. She doesn’t have anything through it but that is a piercing hole he’d seen.

“Again, it is hard, but it can be done,” she says. Her eyes close a little as his fingers leave her ear and touch the line of her jaw. She’s still watching him, and she seems to realize that that’s keeping him from doing more—she closes them completely and he lets his fingers run down the side of her neck. He doesn’t circle it like with Ragnar, but he presses enough to feel a trace of pulse. “What else do you want to know about werewolves?”

“Everything,” he says before he can help himself. He bites his lip and raises his tea halfway to his mouth, then stops. Then puts it slowly down on the table, and instead pulls his laptop around so that Ragnar’s head has more room. “But first, I really want to make sure that you didn’t sign up to any Mi-Go bodyswaps.”

Lagertha’s and Ragnar’s eyes both snap open. Lagertha almost snaps something too, but just stops herself.

“Right, let me explain what the Mi-Go are,” Athelstan says, tapping on the keyboard as the two of them rearrange themselves to look at his screen. “Also, since they’re going to give you Brichester emails, remember to look out for this in any student-group mailers. I’m going to get it out of the offer letter but you can always opt-in afterward and there’s always somebody who thinks this is a _fantastic_ way to avoid their exams…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in _Teen Wolf_ , werewolves normally heal so fast that they can't scar, so they have to use a blowtorch and/or wolfsbane to arrest their healing for things like tattoos.
> 
> The Mi-Go are fungoid aliens who are shaped like winged crustaceans, and they extract your brain and store it because they like their libraries to be living. Bodies are optional.


End file.
